Leila and the Blue Fox by Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Tom de Freston

 2022 

Leila and her mother are refugees from Syria.  Leila lives with her aunt and cousin in England.  Her mother works away from home. Leila doesn’t realise that her mother does this in order to support them all and thinks it’s because she does not want to spend time with Leila. Their big adventure shows Leila that her mother is really the loving parent she wished for.  

Leila joins her mother for the summer. Her mother is tracking the journey of a blue fox, Miso that has trekked over 2000 miles across the Arctic. This part of the story is based on a true event. A fox that the scientists called Anna covered over 2000 miles in seventy-six days.

Miso  gets into trouble and becomes trapped on a thin ice-floe. Leila, being the smallest in the team, rescues her. There is a moral dilemma here: should humans who are observing nature interfere in nature? They do anyway but this only leads them into further trouble: they stray into a territory for which Leila’s mum does not have a visa and where Leila isn’t even registered as being on the ship.  

Leila, Matty and Britta have created a Twitter account for Miso. Support for Leila and her mum from Miso’s Twitter followers and the help of a good lawyer get them out of trouble. However, it is traumatic for them; it brings back memories of their former escape from Syria.  

Leila and her mum are eventually returned unharmed. Miso finds a mate.      

Leila’s story and Miso’s story are intertwined.  We have both points of view.

There are some blue monochrome illustrations throughout and even some transparent overlays. This a beautiful and very tactile book.

The text is quite dense, blocked and in a serif font with difficult ‘a’s and ‘g’s. There is a note about Anna the fox at the end of the book and a short bibliography of Millwood and de Freston.  

 

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Each Kindness by Jacqueline Woodson and E.B. Lewis

                                                          

2012   

 New girl Maya comes to Chloe’s school. She doesn’t say much and is always dressed in shabby probably second hand clothes. The other children tease her. Then she stops coming to the school. The teacher shows the class how kindness can spread like the ripples on the water when you drop a pebble in it. Chloe fails to identify her own act of kindness and regrets not having been kind to Maya.  

This looks and feels like a standard picture book: it is a tactile hardback and includes many pictures that tell more of the story than is in the text.  Yet there is a little more text on each page than in most picture books for pre-schoolers. There are some telling facial expressions which may be easier for a slightly older child to interpret.  This contains a first person narrative that is quite unusual for either the pre-school or the Key Stage 1 child.  

The text uses an adult serif font with difficult ‘g’s and ‘a’s.             

Snakehead by Anthony Horowitz

                                                

 

2015, first published 2007  

This is the seventh of the Alex Rider books.  The stakes get higher still in this one. He has recently t splashed down from his journey into space and has just been reconciled with his guardian Jack Starbright when the Australian secret service employ him.

Alex only accepts this mission because he will be working with Ash, who used to know his father well.  Ash is in fact Alex’s godfather.  Ash has had most of his stomach ripped out and is in constant pain. This is one of the consequences of this sort of work.  MI6 had not been very sympathetic so he went to work for Australian intelligence.

This time his Australian mission gets mixed up with Scorpia again and once more  Alex finds himself working also for MI6. There are gadgets again but mysteriously one crucial one lets him down.  This makes him realises that Ash is in fact a double agent. His other allegiance is to Scorpia.  

Alex learns more about his parents’ death.  Ash was involved.    

Alex is becoming more sexually aware but still in a very subtle way. The novel ends with the reappearance of Sabina Pleasure. She is presented to us as being extremely attractive.   

The book is 398 pages long, with blocked text and an adult but simple font. The chapters are quite long.