The inimitable Lauren Child revived her longest-serving character, Clarice Bean (7m sales, 25 years in print) in 2021. Smile (HarperCollins), her latest title, takes on big themes – ecosystem collapse, at home and beyond – in Child’s matter-of-fact, meandering way. She is one of those gifted authors whose plots bimble along innocuously, with the ever-sparky Clarice internal monologuing about this and that.
All the while, Child unobtrusively builds Clarice’s worry over an ill parent, and her realisation about the role of plankton (small) in sustaining blue whales (huge) for a science project that goes very wrong, but also very right. Libraries groan with publications unfairly tasking the most blameless in society with doing the work of averting climate catastrophe – “things YOU can do”, etc – but Child captures the right worry-to-comfort ratio as disasters are turned around and unexpectedly lovely things happen too.
