Children’s Books: Myth and magic

It was the second week of term and my grandson’s birthday. He had just started at primary school and the only alternative to social suicide seemed to be to invite the whole class to his party. With a few old friends that made a total of 30. They ran yelling in various enjoyably noisy games up and down the church hall, then they departed, and my daughter was left confronting a table groaning with 30 presents, some of them embarrassingly expensive. How do you give 30 presents to one five-year-old?

The same problem comes up every Christmas, and the answer, it seems to me, is books. It may not be good for a child to receive simultaneously 30 remote controlled cars or rockets or complicated electric toys whose batteries rapidly expire, but it never did anyone any harm to be given 30 books. This Christmas there is a good selection for all ages.

A delightful choice for a three-to-five-year-old is The Big Snuggle-up by Brian Patten with beautiful illustrations by the ever reliable Nicola Bayley (Andersen Press, £10.99). This is the story of all the animals who arrive with the scarecrow to take refuge in the narrator’s house during a bitter winter storm. The beautiful and detailed pictures and the rhyming repetitive text will make this a pleasure to read aloud to a small child.

Another book with original and striking illustrations, this time by Levi Pinfold, who also wrote the book, is Black Dog (Templar, £12.99). Everyone in the Hope family is terrified by the gigantic Black Dog, glimpsed out the window in the wintry garden: everyone, that is, except the youngest child, aptly named Small. The pictures of Small in her yellow winter coat confronting the monstrous black hairy hound are particularly good. Stuck, written and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers (HarperCollins, £10.99)