rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_0d7e50ab-d4fc-57c5-8917-a97eefb8e9e3.jpg" alt="image"/> His Dark Materials PHILIP PULLMAN, READ BY THE AUTHOR
SEE ALSO: bored, being • sick, being
care, being taken into
SEE: foster care, being in
carer, being a
SEE: unwell parent, having an
carrots, refusing to eat your peas and
SEE: fussy eater, being a
cast-offs, having to wear
Inculcate affection for pre-loved clothes – baggy-kneed, broken-zipped, and secreting dubious things in the corners of their pockets – with Old Hat New Hat. In this story, the Berenstain bear we know and love tries on every weird and wonderful hat in the shop, from the turban to the one with the propeller on top. Then he spies a tatty old trilby with a patch and a drooping daisy. It’s the one he came in with, of course. Old is so the best.
It’s harder to convince older kids that wearing second-hand clothes is cool, but perhaps not impossible. Set on a council estate in Peckham, Pigeon English tells the story of Harri, a young Ghanaian immigrant trying to make his way in the local gang culture. ‘Have you got happiness?’ they ask him. ‘Yes!’ ‘Have you got happiness?’ ‘Yes!’ By the time he finally gets what they’re saying,2 his street cred has taken a bashing. But how can he ever hope to climb back up the ladder when his mother buys him cast-off trainers at the charity shop?
It gradually dawns on Harri that it’s what’s inside his trainers that he should be focusing on: a natural athlete, he can run faster than any of his peers. This moving story speaks to kids about many issues, including immigration (see: outsiders, distrust of), bullying (see: bullied, being) and peer pressure (see: peer pressure). But in the end it’s about seeing things in perspective. Acknowledge with the kids of your ken that it sometimes feels crucial to be seen wearing the right things. But that it’s even more crucial to keep their eye on the bigger picture.
SEE ALSO: peer pressure • things, wanting • worrying
celebrity, wanting to be a
With the current rash of TV talent shows, kid-hosted YouTube channels and the measuring of popularity by the number of likes and followers one has, it’s hardly surprising that modern children angle for celebrity status. The Strongest Girl in the World shows that hitting the big time doesn’t necessarily lead to contentment. When a friend gets his head stuck between the school railings (see: stuck), eight-year-old Josie discovers she has the power to bend metal. Experimenting with her new-found capabilities, she finds she can also lift tables, people, and even a double-decker bus. It doesn’t take long for someone to spot her money-spinning potential, and she and her family are soon being whisked off to New York by the sleazy Mr Two Suit to find fame and fortune. They find it; but, after much excitement, sensible Josie decides she’d rather live a quiet, happy life after all. Readers will love Josie’s adventurous spirit – and her ultimate choice.
An eye-opening exploration of celebrity from both the idol and the fan’s point of view is to be found in Rockaholic, in which teenage Jody is so obsessed with her rock idol, Jackson (from the fictional band The Regulators), that she’s listening to him on her headphones at her own grandfather’s funeral. When she kidnaps Jackson by accident – he having mistaken her Curly Wurly for a knife, no doubt as a result of the hallucinogens coursing through his veins – she and her best friend find themselves driving him to Jody’s house. The next thing she knows, her number-one fantasy man is unconscious in her bed, naked – and she’s washing him with baby wipes.
It turns out that Jackson loathes his fans and finds it pathetic that they spend their hard-earned cash on his concert tickets. In fact, he pours so much vitriol on Jody’s dream that she’s moved to push him off a bridge. No sooner has she done so than she has the dubious epiphany that if she can only help Jackson detox from the ‘blackberries’ he takes, he might turn out to be the god she imagined him to be after all . . . Thus begins the hilarious account of Jackson’s descent into the troughs of normality, which sees him being transported in a wheelie bin to Grandpa’s converted garage, going through cold turkey and being fed meals by Jody through the cat flap. High comedy, yes; but this story also sheds touching light on the topsy-turvy life of a fan, how much their gods mean to them, and how sometimes it takes a serious dose of life (and death) to help someone see what was staring them in the face all along.
SEE ALSO: precociousness • princess, wanting to be a • spoilt, being
chatterbox, being a
A great number of challenging personality traits can be slipped into a conversation with a child via the relevant Hargreaves character.3 From being messy to being scatterbrained, from being lazy to being mischievous – you name it, there’s a Mr Man (or, now, a Little Miss) whose raison d’être is to model that feature and invite a discussion about it. One of our favourites for curative purposes is Little Miss Chatterbox, the sister of Mr Chatterbox. If Mr Chatterbox can talk the hind leg off a donkey, Little Miss Chatterbox can talk all forty-two legs off a centipede.4 In the course of this story, she gets fired from four jobs – bank teller, waitress, hat shop attendant and secretary – for talking too much; and, one by one, Mr Happy, Mr Greedy, Little Miss Splendid and Mr Uppity are all left in a state of shell-shocked silence. The job she finally
