This year’s standout works for children include joyous picture books, gloriously bizarre nonfiction and stories of courage, companionship and rapturous flight – testament to the human need for connection, justice and freedom.
In picture books, Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury, the author-illustrator team behind We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, collaborate again on the exuberant Oh Dear, Look What I Got! (Walker), in which a shopping trip is beset by rhyming errors (a parrot for a carrot, a snake for a cake). It all results in an ever more despairing refrain: “Do I want that? No I do not!” Oxenbury’s joyfully expressive huddles of animal and human characters heighten the sense of mayhem in this bouncy, cumulative delight, boasting all the ingredients of a perennial read-aloud favourite.
