Children’s books: a picture of happy holiday reading

Children’s books for summer reading? Bookshop and library shelves are crammed with enticing material catering for a wide range of ages and tastes, guaranteed to keep young readers usefully occupied over the holidays. A future column will consider some recent children’s and young-adult fiction, but here the emphasis is on books that come with illustration, a genre that now includes everything from the apparently simplest picture book to the most sophisticated graphic novel.

Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick returns to the picture-book format with The New Kid (Hodder, £11.99). Delightful endpapers of colourful terraced houses frame a touching story of Ellie, a little girl whose imagination and spirit of independence gradually win her the acceptance of the children in her new neighbourhood. Difference, far from being a barrier to friendship, is portrayed as something to be valued, a message conveyed with warmth and humour.

Few of the books that set out to initiate young children into the mysteries of numbers and counting manage to do so with the inventiveness typifying Oliver Jeffers’s None the Number (HarperCollins, £12.99). Featuring Jeffers’s egg-shaped Hueys, the narrative takes the reader through a hilarious sequence that involves introductions to the numbers 1 to 10, but where is “0” – and is it a number at all? Every page invites its own interpretations.

A “great big orange thing called the Yes” sets out, in Sarah Bee’s The Yes (Andersen Press, £11.99), to quell the negative voices of the “Nos”, those “flocks and packs” of irritants who aim to thwart a more positive response to life. Presented as a series of encounters between “Yes” and “No” and set in a vibrantly realised succession of changing landscapes, the storyline is wonderfully enhanced by the dazzling and dramatic colours of Satoshi Kitamura’s illustrations.

Making an equally striking use of bold primary colours, Petr Horacek’s The Mouse Who Ate the Moon (Walker Books, £9.99) is an affectionate, gentle story of Little Mouse’s desire to own a piece of the moon and of the consequences when her wish is granted. With the added attraction of peep-through holes and cutaway pages at various points in the text, the lunar and terrestrial dimensions of Horacek’s story are skilfully merged and the companionship of woodland animal life celebrated.

“I’d better introduce myself. I am Hermelin.” Thus the titular hero of Mini Grey’s Hermelin: The Detective Mouse (Jonathan Cape, £11.99), a creation (and a book) as different from Horacek’s as one could imagine. Fans of Grey’s work will once again relish the hectic pace of her storytelling, its humour, its intertextual allusions, its typographical playfulness and its general layout. But the greatest joy is in the characterisations of the inhabitants of Offley Street, location of the story’s puzzling crimes.

Eva Eriksson’s black-and-white illustrations for Rose Lagercrantz’s My Heart Is Laughing (Gecko Press, £7.99) may at first glance seen unduly understated, perhaps even perfunctory, but as the story proceeds they become an integral part of its narrative. This is an exploration of the nature of childhood friendship and rivalry, hurt and happiness, through the eyes of Dani, a girl whose best friend has moved away.

The Story of Gilgamesh, by Yiyun Li (Pushkin, £14.99), is a spirited retelling of one of the oldest literary works, focusing on its adventure-seeking hero and his pursuit of immortality. Marco Lorenzetti’s illustrations evoke worlds distant in time and place from our own. Yiyun Li’s prose reminds us that, though civilisations may crumble, humanity’s needs and desires are constant. One in a series of beautifully designed Save the Story books, this is a volume to treasure.

First published in 2001, Russell Hoban’s poignant and life-affirming story Jim’s Lion has now been reissued but on this occasion as a graphic novel, with artwork by Alexis Deacon (Walker Books, £9.99). The talents of writer and illustrator magically combine to trace a little boy’s dreams and nightmares as he lies in a hospital bed awaiting an operation. Will he survive? The story’s moments of doubt and darkness are magnificently caught in the symbolism of Deacon’s haunting illustrations.

From Canada comes Fanny Britt’s Jane, the Fox & Me (Walker Books, £15), a graphic novel that, in every aspect of its creation, will extend a reader’s understanding and appreciation of the genre. Layout and colour, small panels and full-page spreads, numerous variations of fonts, scripts and media: all are imaginatively deployed by illustrator Isabelle Arsenault in telling the story of Hélène, a girl on the edge of adolescence, finding solace in literature when her friends reject her. Quite outstanding!

The poems in Alan Murphy’s third collection, Prometheus Unplugged (AvantCard, €11), exhibit a new assurance in matters such as rhyme, rhythm and scansion. Myth and music chime harmoniously in verses where ancient Greek meets ageing rocker and where the encounters resound with literary echoes: “I met a weirdo from an antique band . . . ” The humour of the writing is matched in the colourful collage illustrations, all nostalgically redolent of a time when the summers lasted for ever.