going to eat him – but they’re quick to reassure him. ‘You are one of us now,’ they tell him. ‘We’re all in the same boat.’
This turns out to be true in more ways than one as, having started off in James’s aunts’ garden, the giant peach starts to roll downhill, toppling off the cliffs of southern England and floating out to sea in what is at times an exceedingly perilous adventure. And, as happens in stressful circumstances, the true colours of each of the characters begin to emerge. The grasshopper is wise, the spider hard-working, and the earthworm always hovers on the verge of despair. The lazy centipede, who is forever asking James to help him lace and unlace his forty-two boots5, turns out to be an even bigger pest than everyone suspected – although James is prepared to forgive a lot in return for his rascally sense of humour. All in all, the insects are shown to be as various in personality as humans are themselves – and indeed much more likeable than Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker, James’s two wretched aunts who were, thankfully, flattened to death by the peach at the start. The ants in your garden will breathe more easily after the kids have read this story. Your rellies may not.
The possibility that animals might experience feelings just as we do is explored with an admirable lack of sentiment in Incident at Hawk’s Hill – a story that may transform the attitudes to animals of everyone in the household. Set on the prairies of Canada in the late 19th century, it is the story of six-year-old Ben, the youngest of four siblings and the only one their hardworking settler father, William MacDonald, doesn’t understand. ‘There’s just no communicating with him,’ William complains to his wife. Ben’s strange habit of mimicking the animals and birds around the farm makes his father wonder if the child is even quite normal.
One day, wandering over the emerald-green grasslands, Ben comes face to face with a large female badger – a ferocious predator, quite capable of killing a wolf – who hisses and bares her sharp teeth. Awed and alarmed in equal measure, Ben hisses back; but when he realises the badger is more interested than frightened, he ‘chitters’ and grunts instead. Soon she’s letting him approach her, accepting a dead mouse from his hands, and even allowing him to touch her. When Ben goes home for lunch that day, he is all aglow with the encounter.
Some time later, Ben gets caught in a lightning storm and, frightened and shoeless, takes refuge by backing down a burrow. It turns out to belong to the same badger, recognisable by the notch on her ear; and so begins an extraordinary few weeks in which they share the burrow and care for one another, Ben becoming increasingly badger-like in his behaviour and movements, and the badger increasingly zealous in her protection of the small boy. Told with a keen naturalist’s eye, this story shows that even wild animals may have a lot to teach us about loyalty and respect for others. No teen will treat animals thoughtlessly after reading this.
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animals, fear of
In our atomised and increasingly urban world – where most of us live a long way from the beginnings of the food chain and have no use for animals in our daily lives – it’s no surprise that children can develop a fear of fur, claw, wing and whisker. Such children will learn to love small beasts more easily if they meet them first in books.
My Family and Other Animals – a memoir6 which reads like fiction – is the most entrancing story of living with animals we know. Set on the sun-kissed island of Corfu, it tells of a young Gerald Durrell – known as Gerry – as he discovers a natural affinity for all creatures, from the lowliest insect life to a pelican, brown rats and a dog. As he roams the island gathering specimens for his zoology collection – kept in a dedicated room in the house – we observe, over his shoulder, crab spiders as they change colour to match their surroundings, and black caterpillars that are in fact baby ladybirds. We watch him adopt a tortoise (Achilles) and a pigeon (Quasimodo), who become his constant companions. A young owl (Ulysses) also spends months in his pocket. Gerry’s protectiveness over these creatures is humbling: finding a nest of earwig eggs one day, he erects a sign that reads ‘BEWAR – EARWIG NEST – QUIAT PLESE’. Telling of an idyllic, lost world in which moonlit bathing among porpoises was a regular evening event, no one can read this book without marvelling in a whole new way at the wonders of the natural world. Out of its pages many a young botanist, zoologist or eco-warrior will be born.
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anorexia
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ants in your pants, having
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anxiety
Being entirely dependent on others, babies have good reason to be anxious, and reassuring, familiar stories – such as Guess How Much I Love You, The Runaway Bunny, Thomas the Tank Engine and Frog and Toad7 – create safety and comfort at the end of every day. When levels of anxiety continue into toddler-hood and beyond, throw in The Invisible String. This simple picture book introduces the idea that we’re all attached to those who love us by an invisible string, and that whenever a child misses their grown-up, the grown-up will feel a corresponding tug on their heart.
Constant, low-level anxiety can be debilitating, shutting off opportunities and generally getting in the way of living life to the full. It can also be contagious. Fourteen-year-old Charlie Han in The Bubble Wrap Boy suffers from anxiety passed down from his mother. She still keeps a stair gate at the top of the stairs, and she won’t let him go to the cinema in case he chokes on a piece of popcorn. So when Charlie discovers he has a spectacular talent for skateboarding, it’s an exciting moment for the overprotected boy. And to call it his mother’s worst nightmare is the understatement of the year.
Suddenly, Charlie – who has always been mocked at school for being small, and for being best friends with ‘Sinus’ Sedgley, so named for his enormous nose – finds himself admired for his cool, new hobby. He can fly; he can turn in the air – and he feels like the king of the world. But then his mother catches him at it and launches into a tirade in front of his peers, which is pretty much Charlie’s worst nightmare. Now it’s time for Charlie’s worst nightmare. But there’s more humiliation to come. Once his mother has reduced him to a laughing-stock, a group of boys swathe him in bubble wrap and, thus mummified, leave him to walk home.
It takes the root of his mother’s anxiety to be revealed for Charlie to break free of his own. By the end, the Bubble Wrap Boy has become a graffiti legend. This triumphant, liberating story – great for the grown-up too – is best enjoyed by kids with a sheet of bubble wrap to pop as they go.
The long-eared, twitchy-nosed inhabitants of Watership Down – a story which stands up well to the test of time – will feel like kindred spirits to tweens and teens with an anxious streak, constantly on the alert for danger as rabbits are. As
