"Ella May Does it Her Way" by Mick Jackson and Andrea Stegmaier (Words and Pictures)

Make way for Ella May! No, really, you see in "Ella May Does it HER Way" by Mick Jackson and Andrea Stegmaier you'll meet a little girl who really does love to cut an unusual figure as she weaves her way through the town.

It all started out when Ella May's usual dinner was replaced with something rather strange, something she hadn't seen before.

"Try it" her mum urges her. She does, and discovers that perhaps trying new things isn't as bad as all that after all.

In fact...Ella May discovers the joys of a backwards world. She walks upstairs backward, she climbs backwards into bed, she even reads her books backwards (we tried this with this actual book to see if it revealed the secrets of the universe, but sadly it was not to be).

Ella May is a fab character though, a little bit kooky, a bit crazy, but our kind of crazy. Let's take a look inside the book:

I have to say, if this was our house, Ella would probably have had a massive tantrum when asked to eat some new weird foodstuff she hadn't seen before

We've recently blogged about a need for children's books to remove the requirement to deliver a moral - but Mick and Andrea have created something that feels like an entertaining romp without too much of that going on, just a simple message that we should all try new things and maybe look at the world in a different way.

Kids - don't try climbing up the stairs backwards at home. 

A fun quirky story full of appeal, and the illustrations are lovely, don't you agree?

Love the bouncy intro to this one

Sum this book up in a sentence: A simple and joyful story about trying new things, and what it's like to be an imaginative kid with a world of possibilities opening up before you.

"Ella May Does it Her Way" by Mick Jackson and Andrea Stegmaier is out now, published by Words and Pictures (kindly supplied for review).