Review: Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

Thank you Katherine Rundell for this essay that celebrates the joy of reading children’s books as an adult. There is nothing to be ashamed of, she reminds us, as children’s books are shot through with a ‘furious thirst for justice’ just like fairytales of old. ‘In a world which prizes a pose of exhausted knowingness, children’s fiction allows itself the unsophisticated stance of awe.’ And we all know that it is awe and wonder that brings us joy.

Where do you access children’s books? The library, of course. Rundell champions public libraries and is staggered that ‘since the turn of the decade in England more than £300 million has been slashed from library budgets. More than 8 million people are active borrowers from libraries’ and that doesn’t include all the other services they provide the community, ‘and yet 700 libraries and book-lending services have been closed by councils since 2010’. (This book was written in 2019 so I am sure many more have closed since then.) She argues that ‘it’s our most egalitarian space’ and that inequality is at the heart of all the world’s problems, and ‘in these dustbin-fire days, to turn away from the institution of the library feels criminal. If hope is a thing with feathers, then libraries have wings’. (My italics)

She concludes her essay thus: ‘Children’s books are not a hiding place, they are a seeking place…Read a children’s book to remember what it was to long for impossible and perhaps-not-impossible things. Go to children’s fiction to see the world with double eyes: your own, and those of your childhood self. Refuse unflinchingly to be embarrassed: and in exchange you get the second star to the right, and straight on till morning.’

So, revisit your favourite childhood book, or perhaps read one that you missed at the time, and rediscover the joy of looking at the world with awe and wonder.

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Review: Impossible Creatures
Oh how I would have loved to discover this book when I was a child! Katherine Rundell has written a beautiful story populated by characters you want to know, sharing an adventure in a world you want to visit. It’s like Susan Cooper, mixed with J.R.R. Tolkien and with a dash of Philip Pullman.

Christopher Forrester has a way with animals. His mother did too, but she died nine years ago, ‘and his father had contracted, as if a weight had settled on him’. Christopher is waiting, hoping ‘that there was something more than that which he had so far seen’. Saving a baby griffin from drowning is only the beginning of his adventure.

Mal lives in Archipelago, and has learned how to fly. Her world is populated by creatures of myth and legend. But the glimourie is fading: the glimourie that all magical creatures depend on to live and thrive. How can she stop her world from disappearing?

When their worlds collide, Christopher and Mal join forces to stop the malignant power that is destroying the glimourie. Christopher knows their friendship is special, ‘that sometimes, if you are among the very lucky, a spark of understanding cuts like lightning across the space between two people’.

This book is perfect. It has wonderful creatures (and terrifying ones too), it has riddles (just like The Hobbit), it has wry humour and frightening obstacles for Mal and Christopher to overcome so they can save not only the Archipelago, but our world too. But the best thing about this book is the friendship that Mal and Christopher share - it’s the sort of friendship we all yearn for and if we’re lucky, might only get once in our lives, ‘but once is enough. You need it only once - so that you may know what your human heart is capable of’.

This is the best kids’ book I have read this year. Just brilliant.
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Review: Rooftoppers
Absolutely delightful tale that feels like a ‘classic’. There is a sense of wonder, and an element of magic that made me love this book. Being set in Paris didn’t hurt either. Highly recommended for readers in upper primary, lower high school.
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