Children can take charge of their own destiny in Once Upon a Fairytale (Macmillan, £12.99, 3+), a choose-your-own-adventure picture book by Natalia O’Hara, with gorgeous detailed illustrations from Lauren O’Hara. The book casts the reader as a hero, but what kind of a hero? O’Hara lets you choose. A well-dressed puss, a jolly woodcutter’s son, a mighty witch or a friendly gingerbread man? It is up to you, and you can change your mind every time you read it. The scenarios draw from classic fairy tales, encouraging the reader to subvert traditional formulas from the opening page. Once upon a ... “broken armchair”, anyone? The rich watercolour illustrations also provide fertile ground for young imaginations. The possibilities are not endless, but they seem so, and as the final page is turned little fingers will be flicking straight back to the beginning again for another version of a story in which they get to take charge.
More confident readers will have their imaginations and appetites tickled by Shane Hegarty’s new book The Shop of Impossible Ice Creams (Hachette, £6.99, 7+). Limpet is a vanilla-kind of kid. Despite his ice-cream maker mum’s adventurous recipes (tuna and celery sorbet is just one of her bizarre concoctions), vanilla is a safe bet and Limpet likes safe things. He definitely doesn’t like his new seaside home of Splottpool, nor the sinister Mr Fluffy, his mum’s main rival in the gelato trade. Hegarty gives a sensitive portrait of Limpet’s anxiety, the occasional grotesqueness of his worst-case-scenarios puncturing sombre scenes with humour. Jeff Crowther’s pencil portraits capture the rivalry between Limpet and his “puppy-eyed, lively ... evil” sister Eve particularly well. Be prepared to have a competition for the grossest ice creams around the kitchen table this summer.
There is preparation for a party happening at the kitchen table in Our Big Day by Bob Johnston (O’Brien Press, £12.99, 3+). Uncle David and Simon are getting married, and one special little girl has been invited to help make the decorations and plan the day. She has also been asked to be their ring-bearer, but disaster strikes when she can’t find the ring. Johnston’s well-paced story makes room for an especially memorable character, Bear, who, in Michael Emberley’s joyous illustrations, seems to leap off every page, full of canine mischief, and, eventually, an especially hirsute kind of heroism. In the wedding and the party scenes on the final pages, meanwhile, Emberley gives us a wonderful celebration of diversity. Our Big Day is a perfect accompaniment to a summer wedding, same-sex or otherwise.
Olivia Hope’s Be Wild Little One (Bloomsbury, £6.99, 2+) urges us to celebrate the simple things in nature, with a gentle anthem that gives this artfully simple picture book its title. “Make the world your own playground, fill it with a noisy sound,” she implores the young reader, inviting us to get out into the wild and embrace its sensory pleasures. Daniel Egnéus’s illustrations bring us deep into the jungle and deep under the waves, on to the backs of birds and out on to city balconies, in pursuit of nature’s magic.
In Sarah Moore Fitzgerald’s gripping novel The Shark and the Scar (Orion, £6.99, 10+), Jay has forgotten about nature’s magic. Or rather, his father is trying to protect him from it. After a tragic accident while surfing in France, his father moves him back to the west coast of Ireland, where the details of what happened can be more easily hidden from him. The truth is also being kept from Jess, who has a murky maritime past that her family is also keeping from her, and, despite the discrete voices of shared narration, Moore Fitzgerald slowly brings their stories together with a propulsive plot. Moore Fitzgerald demonstrates a commanding sense of suspense throughout and a sensitive attention to the emotional needs of her protagonists. With its maritime mystery and seaside setting, The Shark and the Scar would make a terrific companion for a beach holiday.
As would The Hunt for David Berman by Claire Mulligan (Moth Press, £6.99, 10+). It is set on the coast of Scotland during the second World War, where evacuee Robert is sick of the onerous endless farm jobs and bullying from peers. “All he wanted was to go back to London … to see his friends again and go to the matinee in the Odeon and eat an ice while he waited for the main feature.” When he meets a young German refugee in a cave at the local beach, he finds himself embroiled in an adventure worthy of any film on the silver screen. Threaded through with a narrative involving German code-breakers, Mulligan’s story brings an original approach to the historical material that smacks of classic adventure tales of E Nesbit. The coincidence of its publication with the cinema release of The Railway Children Returns this week seems particularly judicious.
