Many of Oliver Jeffers’s books have a folk tale flavour, their gentle messages smuggled in via offbeat characters with extraordinary skills or habits (think of The Incredible Book Eating Boy or the girl who hides her heart away in The Heart and the Bottle). Yet The Fate of Fausto (Harper Collins), “a painted fable”, as Jeffers describes it, feels like a fantastically fresh departure.
Fausto is a pompous, pinstripe-suited man with a twirly moustache and a desire to own the natural world. “Tree, you are mine,” he shouts before moving on to the lake as the tree bows obediently. More spare in text and imagery than its predecessors, it’s a tale full of suggestion with expanses of white page wittily used as pregnant pauses and punctuation.
In an age of exquisite picture books, this is possibly the most beautiful of the year. Made with traditional lithographic printmaking techniques, neon pink and yellow shades zing against an earthier palette of green, teal and brown. The aggressive, bullying Fausto is both timeless and utterly of our age (straight out of Westminster, you could say). As he fizzes with rage and makes demands even a toddler would find ridiculous, he’s also very funny. He’s last seen stepping out of his boat to stamp on the obstinate sea.
Another fun ode to nature comes in the form of Joanna Rzezak’s 1001 Ants (Thames & Hudson), a nonfiction book that feels more like a walk in the woods. Rather than pages heaving with text, we gather short facts about the countryside as ants march through it. So when the ants brush past a fern we learn that these plants are older than the dinosaurs and when they run into a snail, that its average speed is three inches a minute. Children will love trying to spot the ant in red socks featured on every spread.
A thin skyscraper of a book, Small in the City by Sydney Smith (Walker) explores the sights, sounds and dangers of the modern metropolis as seen through a little protagonist’s eyes on a wintry day. Smith won the prestigious Kate Greenaway Medal last year for illustrating Town Is by the Sea, about a young boy in a seaside mining community, and he can conjure up a North American cityscape just as impressively – all gridded streets and buildings, traffic lights and crowds (Smith lives in Toronto). The narrator begins: “I know what it’s like to be small in the city... Construction sites pound and drill and yell and dig”, before offering advice about where to find comfort and make friends. Towards the end of the book, we learn who the advice is for, adding even more depth to this warm, sweet tale (it’s hard to resist immediately rereading).
City living is also the subject of Felicita Sala’s debut picture book, Lunch at 10 Pomegranate Street (Scribe). Part biography of an apartment block’s inhabitants, part children’s recipe book, each highly evocative illustration depicts a different resident or family in their kitchen preparing a dish, with the instructions alongside. There’s Mister Ibrahim making baba ganoush who “remembers his childhood home and smiles” or young Maria who mashes avocados for guacamole. I was left longing for more meat on the story, but the book is a wonderful celebration of multiculturalism and food bringing people together. It’s also a unique way to encourage independent readers who are would-be cooks (it’s recommended for five-10-year-olds).
As the summer holidays draw to a close, Matt Haig once again turns his attention to anxious children. In The Truth Pixie Goes to School (Canongate, illustrated by Chris Mould), the follow-up to his bestseller, The Truth Pixie, Aada struggles to make friends at her new school and her “100% fib-free” pixie companion really doesn’t help. Countless children will find solace in Haig’s tale and empathise with Aada as she overcomes hurdles before realising the power of being yourself. The world seems a better place with Haig looking after our collective mental health – if only he could sort out the angry Fausto types too.
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