Children's and Young Adult Books

The first book I ever properly owned – pored over, slept with, inscribed – was an elaborately illustrated hardback copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. One can imagine the producers of the attractively packaged Tollins: Explosive Tales for Children hoping it might assume similar significance for a contemporary seven-year-old boy. Conn Iggulden’s secret and quirky world of the Tollins involves old, greybearded men, intricate maps and plenty of adventures and derring-do by the book’s unlikely hero, Sparkler.

On the morning of 12 August 1864, Hannah Duff sent her three children – Isaac, aged nine, Jane, seven, and Frank, almost four – to gather broom from bushes growing a short distance from their one-room slab hut in the West Wimmera district in Victoria. They walked into the mallee scrub, and that was the last their mother saw of them for over a week. By some miracle, the children survived and were eventually found on the evening of August 20 by a search party which included three Aboriginal trackers. The children had walked nearly one hundred kilometres in those nine days, including twenty kilometres on the first day and six on the last. News of the rescue swept the state and the intense press interest in the siblings and their extraordinary adventure led to the establishment of an educational fund for them, but in particular to reward Jane for her nurturing of her brothers. The Aboriginal trackers were also financially rewarded. When Jane died in 1932, the words ‘bush heroine’ were inscribed on her gravestone.

In eleven-year-old Grace’s world, the ‘saved’ number 11,423 people. Four of those are part of her immediate family; her twin brothers, her mother, and her father, who encourages his daughter’s inquisitive nature and who ‘probably has more interesting thoughts than any other home lighting warehouse manager in Australia’.

Gerald’s murdered great-aunt has left him her entire fortune of £20 billion, and an envelope full of clues. Instead of enjoying a trip to the snow in Australia, thirteen-year-old Gerald finds himself heading to London on a private jet with his parents to attend her funeral. Meanwhile, the world’s most valuable diamond has been stolen, rather comically, from the British Museum, and no one can figure out how. With the help of two new friends, Sam and Ruby, Gerald must solve this double whodunit.

Food is always a winning ingredient in books for children. Mini-chocoholics will devour I Like Chocolate (Wilkins Farago, $24.99 hb, 28 pp), a delicious book that celebrates the delights of chocolate consumption. Davide Cali has produced an enthusiastic and humorous book with gentle messages about sharing and caring, and eating in moderation. Shaped like a large block of chocolate, I Like Chocolate is ‘sugar-free, won’t melt in your pocket and contains no traces of nuts!’ It is almost as satisfying as a really good truffle.

The story features a young boy who details all the reasons why he likes chocolate, and some of the many ways in which it can be eaten. He also describes how it can be used as a comfort food in a range of situations and as a perfect gift for any occasion. Evelyn Daviddi uses a soft green, red, yellow and, of course, brown palette in her cartoon-style illustrations, which feature a wonderfully expressive cast of characters. This ode to chocolate is sure to entice anyone with a sweet tooth.

Young children often use the word ‘sad’ to describe negative or confusing emotions. ‘What you did made me sad,’ they will say. But children, as they get older, learn to offer richer explanations of interior states: grief, exasperation, shock, bewilderment, hurt, ecstasy and joy. It is language that gives us this flexibility of response. The best books offer us language that matches and sometimes even exceeds the richness of our experiences.

While the children’s picture book is a relatively recent literary phenomenon, most picture book authors still tap into the strong traditions of oral storytelling. Multi-award winning author Mem Fox is particularly good at this. Fox’s picture book texts are firmly grounded in the three R’s – the traditional rhythms, rhymes and repetitions found in children’s songs and verses throughout the ages. This, combined with Judy Horacek’s inspired illustrations, was what made Where is the Green Sheep? (2004) such a success.

In the introduction to her Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990), Angela Carter considers the contrary nature of the fairy-tale form. Born of a lively oral tradition, fairy tales are not beholden to veracity, and Carter celebrates the complete lack of desire for verisimilitude in Andersen, Grimm and Perrault: ‘Once upon a time is both utterly precise and absolutely mysterious: there was a time and no time.’ Fairy tales do not beg the reader to suspend their disbelief, they baldly expect us to see the thing for what it is: a tale, a lie. It is all in the telling: which parts of the story the narrator wants to illuminate; which parts she wants to subvert or leave out completely. Carter writes of the modern preoccupation with individualising art, our cultural faith ‘in the work of art as a unique one-off, and the artist as an original’, but fairy tales are not like that. They eschew permanent ownership and the responsibility that implies.