Books

The best new children’s books tackle the big subjects in relatable ways

Titles from Kat Patrick, Lucy Reynolds, Louie Stowell, Aoife Dooley and Sabine Adeyinka

The Spectacular Suit by Kat Patrick, illustrations Hayley Well

Sara Keating's face
Sara Keating
Sat Feb 12 2022 - 06:00

Frankie has a big birthday coming up, but she just can’t decide what to wear: her dresses are ugly, her sweatshirt too boring. What she needs, she decides, is a spectacular suit, but she’s not quite sure her family will understand.

Kat Patrick's empowering celebration of individuality ensures that Frankie gets exactly what she needs: a suit with "lightning bolts streaked across the shoulders…[and] a waistcoat covered in stars". But The Spectacular Suit (Scribble, £12.99, 3+) is not just about appearances. Patrick's story allows the reader to sit with Frankie's emotions as she wonders how to tell her family how she feels. In the end, her fabulous outfit looks exactly how Frankie feels, "like a powerful, stormy sky"; authentic self-expression, after all, is an extremely empowering force.

Hayley Well’s illustrations offer an explosion of colour and shapes to match Frankie’s mood as it shifts from self-consciousness to celebration, resulting in a collaboration that will help both children and their adult readers consider the way in which we use outer armour to reflect our inner selves.

"What does your family look like?" ask the authors of We Are Family (Doodles and Scribbles, £12.99, 3+), and they provide an impressive range of human and animal clan-types for us to consider and identify with. Your family may be big, like a rabbit's, or small, like a whale's. It may have one dad like a Rhea chick or one mum like a pangolin. It may even have two parents of either gender. "There are so many ways of parenting", the book concludes with conviction, "but however you start, once your wings have unfurled, you'll find your true place in this wondrous world".

READ MORE

The families in this gorgeous book are represented by counterparts from the animal kingdom, and writer Lucy Reynolds accompanies her simple rhyming story with small text boxes packed with accessible factual detail. Jenna Herman’s illustrations, which combine a cut-out collage effect with colourful patterned backdrops, ensure this delightful, original book about diversity will be reread on various levels.

Frankie’s family looks different from other people’s. Her mother is sick, her father left when she was a baby, and rumour has it he was an alien. Maybe that is why Frankie feels so alien too. She talks too much. She can’t help saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. She even likes rock music when she is supposed to like pop. “Everyone thinks I am different,” she realises, “and I feel different – I don’t know why.” Aoife Dooley’s graphic story sends Frankie on a quest to find out more about her origins, and find a way to celebrate her difference.

Dooley is a well-known graphic designer and comedian, and she brings these skills together effortlessly in Frankie's World (Scholastic, £12.99, 7+), which offers an amusing and relatable story that celebrates neurodiversity through its sensitive exploration of Frankie's alienation from her peers.

The attractive orange and blue colour palette helps define Dooley’s expressive cartoon shapes, while the clear text in boxes and speech bubbles will help reluctant readers to navigate the story. There is a short guide to autism and allyship at the end, but the real success of the book is how Dooley celebrates Frankie’s individuality, while also making it clear that she isn’t actually as different – as alien – as she thinks.

In Louie Stowell's Loki: A Bad God's Guide to Being Good (Walker, £7.99, 8+) , the trickster god of Norse mythology finds himself banished by Odin to the depths of hell: Earth. Loki is, understandably, unhappy. "First: there is the overall weakness of the human body. Second: there are my fake parents. Third: there is school."

To make matters even worse, he has to keep a stupid diary of good deeds so that Odin knows he has reformed his ever-disruptive ways. Finally, he is not even allowed to use his superhuman powers to help him stay out of trouble. So unfair.

Stowell’s premise is laugh-out-loud funny, from the rolling failure of Virtue Scores that frame each chapter to the constant needling between Loki and Thor, who is also earth-bound, in the form of Loki’s twin brother. The pages are full of doodles, cartoons and playful fonts that will appeal to fans of Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid. And despite the Norse scaffolding, Loki’s (mis)adventures are as relatable as Greg Heffley’s: power struggles with teachers and parents, overcoming bullies, tending and mending friendships. A sequel is already in the works.

Jumoke, the heroine of Sabine Adeyinka's Jummy at the River School (Chicken House, £6.99, 8+) also cannot help getting into "hot soup". So she is surprised to win a place at the River School, an exclusive girls' boarding school in Nigeria. But Jumoke must say goodbye to her best friend Caro: who will help her do the lines she gets as punishment for misbehaving now?

Adeyinka has crafted a traditional boarding school tale, full of midnight feasts and night-time drama. However, the culturally specific class-based conflict, which sees Jummy risk her own security to help a less fortunate friend, elevates it to the top of a crowded genre.