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Children’s books: From earthly delights to guardian snow angels

From Christmas themes to more universal themes of love, loss and mismatched sisters

If You Come to Earth. Copyright Sophie Blackall

Sara Keating's face
Sara Keating
Thu Nov 12 2020 - 06:00

Ignoring the particular circumstances of these crazy times, how would you describe the world we live in? Sophie Blackall’s longform picture-book is full of answers, crowdsourced from the thousands of children she has met upon her travels across the world.

If You Come to Earth (Chronicle Books, 5+, £12.99), presented in the form of a long letter from a young child to a "Visitor From Outer Space", zooms in telescopically on "the greeny-blue planet" of Earth, its idiosyncratic beauty, where people live in big cities or in the middle of nowhere and "in all kinds of homes, in all kinds of families".

Blackhall’s text is economical but the illustrations are wonderfully detailed, inviting the studied gaze of children looking for their own points of identification. They are witty too: a double-page spread comically illustrates how “we show our feelings on our faces”, while the contradictory taxonomy of nature is celebrated in a stunning collection of creatures of the Earth that runs (and swims and flies) across three pages.

What We'll Build (HarperCollins, 3+, £14.99), by Oliver Jeffers, builds a world for the reader from the ground up. Examining their tool kit, a girl and her father create what they need for their shared future. The structures they build are metaphorical as well as physical. Together they create a house that they can call a home, "a hole where we can hide" from danger, and "some love to set aside" for each other, or others who might need it.

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They find a welcome for those who threaten to harm as well as help them, reinforcing the humanist subtext that underpins this personal story, which ends with the heart-filling image of a daughter’s tiny hand in her father’s.

Two sisters hold hands in Clock of Stars: Shadow Moth (HarperCollins, 8+, £12.99), the debut fantasy novel from Francesca Gibbons. The sisters, Imogen and Marie, don't get on, but when they find a door in a tree in Haberdash Gardens, they have no choice but to work together as they explore the mysterious land in which they become trapped.

The spirit of Narnia infuses Gibbons’s book, but the fantasy world the sisters are thrust into is original and thoroughly realised. As they meet the powerless prince Miro, his reigning evil uncle, and rampaging bears, they look to the flittering shadow moth for guidance; this delicate creature is the key to ensuring they find their way home. This is a story young readers will find hard to let go of, but fear not, there is a second instalment on the way.

Looking ahead to Christmas, Sibeal Pounder's Tinsel (Bloomsbury, £6.99) interrogates the origins of Yuletide rituals, providing an alternative angle on the Victorian myth we so readily accept. What were the mores of Victorian life, Pounder encourages the young reader to ask? Women weren't allowed to ride horses, let alone command sleighs, she tells us in the opening pages, and so Tinsel posits an entirely different version of the celebrations we cling to in the present day.

These traditions, Pounder’s story suggests, were invented by Blanche Claus, who you might better know as Santa’s missus. Pounder’s fictional origin story features orphans, an enchanted bauble, shape-shifting elves, a Snowcus Pocus spell and a villain called Mr Krampus whom you should be careful not to believe. For festive fun with a comic spirit, Tinsel fits the bill.

Catherine Doyle's The Miracle on Ebeneezer Street (Puffin, 8+, £12.99) reinvents the classic Victorian tale A Christmas Carol for a new generation. It has been three Christmases since George last celebrated the season; his mother died en route to buy marzipan and his father is still in mourning, When he finds an enchanted snow globe in Marley's Curiosity Shop, the past, present and future are opened up to him and his father and, like the Scrooge who gave his name to the road they live on, they develop the capacity to heal.

Doyle draws plenty of parallels between Dickens’s characters and her own, but the relationships across time and genre are not laboured. Even without the classic subtext, this is a story of hope, adventure, redemption and love that stands firmly on its own (elf-slippered) feet.

Maggie O'Farrell's Where Snow Angels Come From (Walker Books, 5+, £14.99) is not set at Christmas but shares a preoccupation with the spirit world and the healing power that the spiritual dimension offers us in time of need. Sylvie wakes one night to find an angel in her bedroom. It is the angel's first time visiting the girl in his charge and, having been spotted on entry, his mission is compromised.

The two have already met, however. Sylvie made him the previous winter. When the snow melted, his spirit soared into the heavens and he has been watching ever since, ready to descend if Sylvie is ever in danger. Of course, childhood is a miracle of survival (ask O’Farrell herself, whose I Am, I Am, I Am described her many close encounters with death, or indeed Agnes, the protagonist of her Women’s Prize winning novel Hamnet, whose life is defined by her 11-year-old son’s death). However, Sylvie’s snow angel is there to ensure her safety.

Daniela Jaglenka’s shimmering watercolours bring an extra layer of magic to O’Farrell’s comforting fable, as Sylvie’s snow angel wraps his soft wings around her like a blanket when she is ill, or appears as feathery sea foam when the sea overcomes her. This is O’Farrell’s first book for children but it is an assured classic.