Bloomsbury ISBN 9781408864838 £6.99
This wonderfully nostalgic title harks back to the years of Listen with Mother on the BBC and is so familiar, it features in the Oxford Book of Quotations. Here, Leigh Hodgkinson manages to give it a timeless feel. A small person is hunting for the perfect place to sit and read a book (hurrah!), but it’s not an easy task. The chair cannot be ‘buzz-buzzy’, or ‘growly, itchy, fuzzy’. It mustn’t be slimy or soggy and cannot be too far. On each collage-effect coloured page, a different chair with a pattern carefully designed to suit the meaning of the text takes centre stage. With each chair, the boy gathers another companion on his search, so that by the end, he comes to value the act of sharing a book anywhere, albeit with such disparate companions as a monster, an alien, a mouse and a bear! The final spread with its upside down text to read is a delight. I loved the premise of the book, the bold, clever designs, the imaginative descriptive language so redolent of small children trying to describe things and the use of calligrams to reinforce the meaning of words such as ‘fuzzy’, ‘cold’ or ‘tree’. The opportunities for children in Reception or Y1 to design their own chairs or favourite reading places, and the conversations they could make up between the characters, make this an ideal text to share. My ‘Bah! Humbug’ moment, however, comes through the liberal scattering of capital letters in the ‘wrong’ places in the text. It’s hard enough teaching this concept to young writers without having it all undermined in the books they read… or does that matter?
Sue Barrett, former primary deputy head and senior lecturer in Primary Education at CCCU