Testing. Testing is still seen as the be all and end all of driving and determining a child's level of literacy, numeracy and skill in other academic subjects. The current Government (I use that term loosely, 'cage of gibbons' is probably more of an appropriate description but I quite like gibbons so maybe not) believes this entirely, and has spent its years in power promoting and pushing that on education professionals at all levels.

Literacy in particular has been under such close scrutiny, and it's clear that the current education strategies are failing kids left right and centre, and not producing the magical literacy engagement that folk want to see. A mass of fronted adverbials, and the almost rectal pain of trying to get kids enthusiastic about reading, books and literacy through deep analysis of the structure of our language is clearly missing the point.

I was lucky as a kid. Lucky that even though I went to three very rough schools, each had its own library (in fact the roughest of the three had a huge library, extremely well stocked, that wasn't just a place to go and find amazing books but a refuge for kids like me who really wanted to be anywhere else other than the playground at playtime). It wasn't even something that was discussed or debated back then. Nearly all schools would consider it to be one of the most important resources, and the librarian to be someone that wasn't just there to check out books, but someone who could drive that much-sought-after engagement with books (have you, honestly, ever met a librarian who just did their job for the paycheck?)

My passion for books and reading came from home and from parents / grandparents and uncles, but also from our school librarian who (with a twinkle in her eye) could almost uncannily predict which books would be a hit or a miss with me.

My daughter has attended the same school from Reception right through to seniors, again a school that (thankfully) not only has a library but recognises its importance as a resource and a hub for its pupils. Sadly libraries are often the first thing to be cut when a school needs to tighten its belt, and on Twitter the rallying cry of librarians, authors, illustrators and just about everyone involved in kidlit is loud and singular in focus - Schools need libraries, no ifs no buts.

We often hear the same thing - that prisons are required to have libraries and books yet schools aren't and I can't even get my head around why this is a thing. I understand that there are folk who share the view that the internet is all the library we need now, but the internet is an unstaffed resource full of misinformation, fake news, distractions and of course a smattering of useful knowledge that's as much fun to unpick as all the cables nestling under your telly. We need libraries - in our towns, in our schools, and we can drive amazing engagement with books through them, we can let kids build their own reading journeys without pushing tests and ridiculous deconstruction of the language on them. It can be done but the push has to come from the top.

Maybe we've just outgrown them. Maybe it's just that Christmas is no longer that magical time in C's life when she can't wait for Santa to blunder his way down the chimney to drop off a sackload of presents (including, we'd hope, a ton of books).

Or maybe it's that this week's ReadItTorial is talking about the dreaded "C" word (Christmas - not my daughter!) way too frickin' early. I mean it's not even November yet.

But like all dutiful book bloggers who try to stay ahead of the curve, we've been reading and reviewing this year's crop of christmas books released so far - and we're considerably underwhelmed.

In fact, let's be honest about it, most of the time Christmas books are truly awful, recycling saccharine-sweet messages that make you want to claw your own eyes out, or worse - resorting to farts, poo, wee, bums and pants to try and jolly up the season of goodwill.

The reason for using Raymond Briggs' classic "Father Christmas" in the header image of this document is not because this is a bad example of a christmas book, but the very best example of a children's picture book (some might argue - given Raymond Briggs' 'comic strip' stylings in some of his stories that this is more a graphic novel than a picture book) that has a christmas theme but has so much fun with the whole concept that you could read it at any time of year and still giggle about it.

In fact we have - for this and his follow-up with a holidaying Santa.

Many authors tap the christmas market quite successfully for 'bread and butter' books but seldom few make books that you'd consider for any 'book of the year' awards. Arguably so, but whenever we draw up our list we very rarely bother to look at anything even vaguely yuletide-related, because it never feels like that's where the innovation, the excitement, the true originality will be found. It's nearly always in books that (statistically, for us at least) arrive slap bang in the middle of the year just after the first few major book fairs have been and gone.

So why is it so hard to write a decent christmas book? I suspect that it's for the same reason it's notoriously hard to write a hit christmas song / single. The whole season is draped in so much cheesy nonsense that it's impossible to see through all that tinsel and garishness and nigh on impossible to deliver a message that hasn't been seen or heard a zillion times before.

Before this article went live, a few blogger / Twitter chums did actually see the point in beginning the blog talk about Christmas books a bit earlier than our usual December Booky Advent Calendar. So how about this for a compromise. Below are ten truly awe-inspiring Christmas books from yore that stand as brilliant examples of how do to Christmas books 'right' (11 if you include Father Christmas by Raymond Briggs of course, which you absolutely should!)

In no particular order...


"How Winston Delivered Christmas: An Advent Story in Twenty-four-and-a-half Chapter" by Alex T. Smith 

(Macmillan Children's Books) 

Part Advent, part brilliantly inspirational story about sending and receiving wonderful letters at christmas, and an entirely classy and fabulous wordy book that will keep you reading every bedtime right up until the big day itself!




"Home Alone - The Classic Illustrated Storybook" by John Hughes and Kim Smith 
"Emily Brown and Father Christmas" by Neal Layton and Cressida Cowell 
"The Accidental Father Christmas" by Tom McLaughlin 
"Christmas Dinner of Souls" by Ross Montgomery  "Shooting at the Stars - The Christmas Truce of 1914" by John Hendrix  "When It Snows" by Richard Collingridge 

See that lady in the header graphic for this week's #ReadItTorial (yeah I know, we've been a bit slack about writing these of late, but now the new school term is under way it's time to clamber back on that hoss).

Yeah that lady is judging you. She's wagging a finger. She's effectively telling you, via the medium of body language, that what you're doing is wrong, and you need to change your deviant ways before it's too late.

Quite often, with picture books, we feel like this lady is the author - and the author is doing the finger wagging, along with their illustrator, and we're on the recieving end.

There's no doubt that some "message books" (as we've dubbed them just for the purposes of this article) really do lay on their core moral thickly with a trowel.



Sometimes it's like being a kid again and getting to the end of an exciting episode of "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" only to have that wretched perfect-haired twerp Adam of Eternia turn up at the end to spell out the episode's moral, because me, a mere telly watcher, would never have got there on my own.



Falling headlong into the category of "YEAH OK, WE GET IT, WE HEARD YOU THE FIRST TIME" picture book morals we are getting a bit frayed around the edges with:

• Different can be great!
• You might not love yourself, but others love you!
• Friends are fantastic, go get some, no srsly you guys, do that thing!
• Honestly, don't be a dick. No one likes a dick. See that dick in this story who's all sad at the end of the book? He was a dick so don't be one. 
• Reading books is great (y'know, you really don't need to preach this one, we got it!)
• *New Entry* - The planet is buggered. Go and pick that piece of litter up and stop buying LOL dolls or we're all in serious trouble (We'll let this one pass though, as let's face it, it's more than a little bit important, no?) 

Even C's cousins (who are more in the marketable age group for PB texts) do a brilliant eyeroll every time a book begins to better the humans reading it. It's quite something to see a 3 and 5 year old already looking world-weary when a PB veers off the path of being a piece of entertaining story into finger wagging territory.

Everyone's favourite type of children's book - Celebrity books (everyone loves them, right? I mean they must do, because publishers still throw ALL THE MONAYES at them) seem to be notoriously guilty of judging us, bless them.

Being famous automatically means you're cleverer than almost anyone else on the planet, and should absolutely tell people who aren't famous how they should behave. It's your moral duty as a celebrity, after all. When you've had smoke blown up your Dartford Tunnel for so long, that smoke has an intoxicating effect - doubly so if you're a "Posho" celebrity who feels that the underclass would not arrive at the conclusion that being a raging dickhole rather than being nice to people will result in superbombad things happening to you.

Most celebrity picture books are underpinned by thick-set morals like the bouncer at the door of a night club.

"Sorry guv, you're not getting in until you change your behaviour, get some friends, be happy in your own skin, realise the very thing you're looking for was right in front of your face all along" or a zillion other messages we secretly wish commissioning editors and publishers would stop treating like the next best thing.

Or are we just being a bit mean here? Perhaps picture books should not exist unless it's to make us all better people, or inspire us to think of things that we might not have arrived at under our own steam.

But parents know if there's one thing that's almost guaranteed to make a kid do the exact opposite of what you're telling them, it's saying that thing along with the wagging finger - and we really wish that picture books would just go back to dishing up fantastic, entertaining and brilliant stories rather than the constant barrage of moral adjustment that seems to be the trend at the mo.

Our family car conversations are sometimes a bit esoteric, or just downright weird but on the way back home from a small break in Cornwall both my wife and I had a lot of examples of what happens when kids pass through that weird transitory period between being kids, to being "Tweenagers" - not quite the mobile-phone-staring-fashion-makeup-sleep-in-till-1PM Teenager, but a strange pseudo-version of that (11 seems to be the sweet spot for this but many parents say their 9 and 10 year olds are going through the same).

Having spent the weekend with our niece and nephew (who are both tinies, and still at the stage where they'll see a ladybird and be utterly transfixed by how amazing it is) going back home in the car there was one small glimmer of hope from C.

I can't quite remember what the conversation was originally about, but it transpired that she would be happy to be me for one reason and one reason only. "You can draw good, Daddy!"

See, I make no bones about this. I am not a brilliant artist, I'm not even a fair-to-middling one and I have a very narrow set of artistic skills and an even narrower set of subjects I like to sketch or paint. But to have that one tiny glimmer for a moment that my kid thought I was cool because I could do something they think no other dads can, that was worth hanging on to.

In other news, it's mobile phone time. We've tried to stave off this moment for as long as possible, and we're still being a bit stubborn and grumpy about internet / wifi access but C now has her first mobile - and with it I'm bracing myself for entertaining two non-communicative ladies in the house in a typical evening (as her mum, despite her protests, spends an inordinate amount of time on her phone in any given evening). I usually retreat to my room to cuddle a games controller or an art tablet when my efforts to try and get us all doing something as a family ultimately fail, but I wish this wasn't a symptom of owning a new communications device - basically everyone not communicating!

C usually doesn't take a telling from me on any given subject. Mum is the authority, we both know she wears the trousers and it's her way or the highway so I'm hoping that'll hold out for a bit longer at least.

Back to the original topic though - the last amusing anecdote is one about "Silly Daddy vs Serious Daddy". For a long while I've been telling C that I should probably be a lot more like the other dads of kids in her school. Most of them are quite sombre chaps. Possibly very career driven. Possibly don't have much in the way of hobbies or interests, perhaps spending their evenings shuffling paperwork for their businesses, or perhaps gluing themselves to whatever sport is on the telly. None of them would dream of turning up for school pickup wearing a Ghibli T Shirt (suit, or at the very least a shirt and tie and 'proper' trousers - not jeans), and you'd certainly never see any of them diving onto the swings at a playpark, or telling the most terrible jokes (and laughing at them loudly themselves).

So I gave her the choice. Should I grow up a bit and become serious daddy? Or continue on my merry brainless way being 'silly' daddy? The vote was unanimously for the latter!

You. Yes specifically you. It's all your fault. For every person I hear moaning that Disney is A) taking over the planet (or more specifically, the entertainment industry and B) they're remaking / rebooting everthing, I feel like wrapping this article in a baseball bat and clocking them around the head with it...

The Lion King Has Edged Out Frozen As the Highest-Grossing Animated Film of All Time, More Proof That Disney’s Monopoly Is Inescapable and Nothing Mat...

Every time a new Disney project is announced, it's got to the point where I'm no longer surprised to find that the most hyped movies in their upcoming schedules are all ones that we've either seen before, or are seeing in a slightly different form - and the ones that make gigantic box office revenues are either sequels, remakes or reboots.

The animated-movie-remakes-into-CGI-snore-fests is a trend that seems to have garnered a fair amount of traction but so is mining the rich seam of every company's IP that Disney hoovers up in their land grab of the industry.

I used to think that it was worth making a fuss about the lack of middle grade and YA-based movies and TV shows being made, instead passed over for stuff like a new Home Alone franchise, a (god help us) new "Night at the Museum" film (when the corpse of the last one is still warm). The problem is you again, yes you movie-goers. You really don't seem to like movies based on cool books.

Why is that? Is it that there's a huge majority of readers like us out there who would rather read the worst book ever written than watch the best movie of that book they can make?

There have been some pretty high-profile movie 'bombs' based on utterly fantastic books ("Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" and "Mortal Engines" are just two recent ones that spring to mind) so it's easy to see why big studios are no longer taking risks. They hoover up the movie rights to books (mostly to stop their competitors from ever 'making bank' with them) but often those scripts stay unwritten, those movies never reach pre-production, and we're left with the situation as it is now.

Books are particularly problematic though. Even if an author or publisher has some involvement in a project, it's not often with enough influence to stop some really bad decisions being made in the execution of that movie. In one hand you've got the aforementioned fans of the book who absolutely won't entertain anything that doesn't fit with their own mental image of what a filmed version of that book should be like. On the other hand you've got a stack of cinemagoers who have no idea that the original book even exists, and need to be wowed by something that hooks them in. That's even before you get to the part where the original book is completely unfilmable, unless you've got infinite amounts of money to waste trying to explore the 6 or 7 movies, or the expensive TV show you'd need to make in order to do the original material justice.

It feels like the movie industry long ago realised that all people really want are more movies like the ones they've watched a zillion times before, which is why so many movie franchises long outstay their welcome (I can think of no other solid reason why we ended up with 5 (FIVE!!!!) terrible "Transformers" films.

So no more moaning about Disney's approach. I'm not defending them, I'm not sticking up for them, I'm telling you that you're very much part of the problem because you will keep going out and paying good money to watch this stuff.

This week's #ReadItTorial is partly book inspired, after all it was Ellie Dix's fantastic "The Board Game Family: Reclaim your children from the Screen" that set our cogs whirring this week (check out her Dark Imp blog via that link).

With C away at Guide Camp for an entire week, I had a good chance to thoroughly digest and absorb Ellie's book, reinforcing something that we've already known as a family for a very long time.

Board games are blimmin' awesome, and they've come a long way since the ones you probably remember playing on wet rainy afternoons while stuck on a caravan holiday as a kid.

Back then I remember the almost religious experience of digging out hoary old games like Operation ("There goes his funny bone!") or Mouse Trap (did anyone ever, in the entire history of humanity, ever get their mousetrap contraption to work first time? No, us neither!) or more action-orientated games like the mighty Kerplunk or a really obscure one for you 70s kids, "Tip-It" - a strange balancing game involving a poor circus performer balancing on his nose.

Board games are now a serious moneyspinner for a lot of startups and gaming companies. You see it's catching on, this idea that there are real and actual ways to get a family sitting round a table and having a conversation, having fun and most importantly interacting with each other.

Playing a strategic or hilarious game does more to help a family bond with each other than any electronic or videogame-based equivalent (though I do know plenty of folk who commonly bond over videogames too, good for them I say!)

Like a lot of parents, we are rapidly approaching that hideous eventuality - their kid getting their first mobile phone and become an uncommunicative hunch-shouldered screen-staring zombie.

We've had many conversations about what we hapless parents can do about it - ranging from the horrible notion that we'd have to become foul draconian monsters, limiting phone / screen time severely, ensuring phones aren't allowed in her bedroom, disabling the wi fi, all the usual stuff you see well-meaning child care experts blathering on about.

Or perhaps, just perhaps, we can head this eventuality off at the pass with the use of board games, as Ellie suggests.



A lot of her advice is sound and really brilliantly structured into chapters that show the positive effects and scope of including board gaming in you life.

It's fair to say that some of it really wouldn't work for us as a family, and other bits just sound too idealistic to be realistically applicable to anyone but the smallest number of folk (still more bits in the book make Ellie sound like at home, it's definitely her way or the highway!)

But overall the idea is intriguing, enticing and could very well be one method of avoiding that hateful eventuality.

Give kids something else that's more interesting, more engaging and (hopefully) stimulating than whatever their friends are getting up to on Instagram, Twitter or other social media bits and bobs - and they'll leave their phone in another room. In Ellie's case she's talking about board games but there are plenty of other activities that would work too (ever sat down with your kids and drawn / coloured / made books / comics, for example?)

There's also the chance for kids to get one over on their elders if they win. Ellie's very clear about her own in-house rules. All participants in games play to win, and that does sometimes mean that in certain games the kids miss out. But it's something else that's worth learning - being a graceful sporting loser as well as a humble sporting winner. That's a life lesson we could all do with a reminder of as it's seldom covered elsewhere.

We already love board games, though the cost can sometimes be prohibitive (it is definitely not a cheap hobby to get into, with some popular games ranging from between £20-50 quid a throw - about the same you'd pay for most modern console videogames, though arguably board games could long outlast those, lifespan and attention-grabbing wise). Ultimately though it feels like it'd be a worthy investment, and definitely preferable to what usually happens after we've all got home, had a meal and settled down for the evening or at weekends.

I think Ellie really does put forward some really positive points in her book, maybe there is a better way - and maybe at ReadItDaddy Towers we should pour everything into making it work before the inevitable screen zombification kicks in. I mean who wouldn't fancy sitting down to an evening of "Exploding Kittens", "Munchkins" or "Pandemic" rather than an evening looking at the silent glow of a mobile screen filled with some worthless mumbo jumbo.

(Ellie's book "The Board Game Family" is out now, published by Crown House Publishing).

It began with tears. A lot of tears, in fact every single morning from the start of Nursery School right through to around Year 4 of Junior School, C would cry her eyes out every morning at drop-off.

My wife was way tougher than I was, able to swing in, drop C off with a teacher or class assistant, then swoop out again without looking back.

Never look back. That's apparently the key to it all, and the thing I was never any good at. I always looked back.

So after year 4 what changed? Parents with naturally anxious kids will know that there's no magic solution to the school drop-off problem, but we firmly believe that it took a teacher with a huge amount of patience, understanding and professionalism to slowly bring C around. That, and her regular attendance of Brownies / Guides have helped to shape her into someone who now takes the school drop-off in her stride, has gone on countless camps and summer schools, loves drama, but is still one of the 'quiet' kids in class (and as her form teacher for this year wrote in her report, she might be quiet but she's just as capable of making a valuable contribution to every class she's in, as much as the louder kids - and god, how long has it taken for someone to understand and acknowledge that?)

But as the article header says, where did the time go? The last 10 years seem to have whipped by in an instant. We're all older, we're somewhat wiser, we're certainly a lot more tired - but the soaring highs have outweighed the lows, and C enters Senior School next year with a trophy for her art endeavours (which just made my jaw completely drop!) and a glowing final report.

I'd like to say that my wife and I should take some credit for some of that. We have always made time for our daughter, and sometimes more time than kids would get in a family where they weren't the only child - and we fully understand that.

Sometimes it's because she needs a rocket, needs an extra push or extra effort to get her motivated (what kid doesn't?)

At her leavers party last week, parents of the kids in her class gathered for one last chinwag, some of us for the last time as kids are moving off to different schools. I think the one thing we all agreed on is that school is such a huge part of kids' lives and the effort teachers go to can often be taken for granted, overlooked, teachers blamed for the kids' shortcomings when often it takes a delicate balance from both parents and teachers to see kids through their academic time.

We're wondering how fast the next 6-8 years will go and what will happen next. Sometimes I feel my age, I'm well aware I've got a good 10-20 years on most of the dads of kids in C's class. Sometimes I don't feel my age at all, and as I lined up to play rounders against the kid team at the leavers part (in the blistering heat), watching as they systematically trounced us, I felt 12 again.

Kids have a habit of making us feel old, but also keeping us young. Treasure that feeling for as long as it lasts, and savour every moment they're in junior school, it will pass by so durned quickly.

I'm not really sure how it happened, but I know it's now driving me mad.

I'd 'put away' my creative writing efforts recently, after suffering something far worse than writer's block.

Most creative folk are familiar with that weird feeling you get when a blank page / piece of paper / word document is staring you in the face, and you have absolutely nothing in your seemingly 'empty' brain to fill it with.

But what I've had recently isn't writer's block, it's something else. It's writer's Diarrhea for want of a better (less icky) description.

I've said before in previous ReadItTorials that sometimes being creative, or struggling to express your creativity can feel akin to mental illness. You have all this STUFF in your brain, your imagination centre, and you want to use that stuff to produce a piece of (hopefully) finished work - whether it's a drawing, a sculpture (and I'm recently rediscovering the joys of sculpting - more on that in another ReadItTorial) or a piece of writing.

I started back into writing again for two reasons. Someone I was on a creative writing course with wrote to me to tell me that one of the pieces I shared in class had such a profound effect on her, and a good friend of hers, that I should bloody well do something about it.

I tried - of course I tried - but traditional publishing avenues (sending blind submissions to agents and publishers) rammed that piece of work into a solid brick wall. So I let it 'rest'.

Then last week my daughter asked me what the heck I was doing with my writing. Where are all the stories I keep talking about or teasing her with? Where's that science fiction / time travel story I discussed? Why haven't I polished up the other stories I read to her?

The simple answer was that I just couldn't flipping get those stories into any sort of form that seems acceptable to publishing in any form. It might just sound like the moaning wail of someone who gets a polite boilerplate rejection letter after every submission (if you get any form of communication at all) but I seriously do not think anything I write is palatable in the current publishing environment. It doesn't stick to rules, it doesn't have wide-ranging enough appeal perhaps. It can't be serialised, turned into a long-running sequel-after-sequel money making thing. Or, more likely, it's just shit and not commercial enough and that's the end of it.

Creative writing - particularly for children - isn't just about coming up with a great idea, a 'hook' or (hold your breath) something original that's quite unlike anything else out there. It's more about something I've never been any good at. It's selling that idea in a way that it will slot nicely into someone else's mind just as easily as it fits in yours.

This isn't exclusive to me - and hearing that a published / successful author had at least 52 stories run into that same brick wall was weirdly comforting. Probably not the original person's intent, but yes, weirdly comforting to know that someone whose published books rock would also have the same trials.

I think one of the main reasons I've ranted about the industry so much recently is that it feels like the whole thing is geared up for a very tightly defined and very specific set of story criteria that I'm entirely incapable of creating for.

The rules - oh god, the many, many rules are the first huge hurdle.

Then there's the structure the rigid structure of picture books which is, in itself, challenging and tough to crack successfully.

Then there are the considerations around whether your text will work well enough for an illustrator to be able to add to and enhance (with middle grade fiction, it's those  infuriating concepts of 'staying with the story moment' and 'show, don't tell').

As I mentioned on Twitter, if it wasn't for my daughter (and for the mysterious emailer who keeps prodding my pathetic little ego by saying she once liked one of my stories) I'd have chucked it all in ages ago, and just resigned myself to the fact that writing isn't for me. But here I am, still plugging away, still punching the screen, and still with a ton of shapeless ideas that feel like they COULD be good.

If only I was better at sticking to rigid rules...

Last year, this infographic presented a stark view of diversity in children's books and it seems not much has changed this year either.

No one even vaguely interested in children's literature could possibly deny that there's been a huge upsurge in the number of brilliant and diverse books featuring BAME characters arriving on bookstore shelves (and, thankfully, our review pile). Yet once again a recent article in The Guardian makes it abundantly clear that even in 2019, when you could argue we're going through something of a 'golden age' for diverse titles with a good mix of genders as lead characters, there's still an awful lot of work to be done.

The article in question:

theguardian.com/books/2019/jun…

Though the article specifically highlights a huge problem with mainstream children's titles still failing to give girls the central / lead / speaking role, it also highlights the lack of BAME / Disabled characters  - now often used as little more than 'fillers' in a story where their character could be removed and have no effect on the story at all).

Sometimes it feels like these characters are just 'stickered in' so that major publishers can comfortably say they've got the diversity base covered.

Why the hell is that happening, I mean at all?

What is the point in just adding in a BAME character in some vain box-ticking exercise?

It's just not enough, not nearly enough.

What frustrates me is that it still feels like it always has to be some sort of an uphill struggle to make any progress with this whole thing, rather than something that should just happen naturally in children's storytelling. Surely it's in everyone's best interest to ensure the widest possible audience for the books you publish?

Where is it all going wrong? I have many theories and some of them are distinctly less palatable than others but first and foremost I agree with others who believe that the problem isn't that these books aren't there, it's often that they're not well publicised / high profile enough.

PR campaigns always seem to over-hype children's books that really do not need that extra push. Book store POS displays again do the same, and the less said about supermarket bookshelves (if they even have any) the better, but find a decent bookstore (even a high street chain) and start looking through the shelves - and you'll often find the diverse books you're looking for placed edge on in the shelves.

So they're there but practically invisible to casual browsers who come in and see the bigger displays and are drawn to them without rootling through the other stuff. We visit book stores a lot and we tend to see a very predictable pattern of behaviour from some parents who take their kids in there. They seem to want to get in there, buy a high profile book, and get out again as swiftly as possible. Something we find completely bizarre tbh.

So it's all marketing's fault then? But why would PR and marketing folk purposely ignore a huge swathe of books and potential customers intentionally?

Is it that they feel that these titles would not "make bank" as much as the others? After all, if you've got a big-name author on your books, and they're getting a huge advance, you've got to make sure their books bring the money in, so the focus of attention currently seems to be to push those harder than anything else (ironically, spending more PR / Marketing money in the process. Bonkers!)

Sadly, as well as the above, I also believe that there's a real problem with representation in the industry itself, right across the board from top to bottom, and it's horribly evident if you've ever been to any non-festival PR / book tour events (a recent one made me so uncomfortable that I had to bolt for the door, it was a completely surreal experience that one of these days I'll sum up the courage to blog about in another ReadItTorial rather than bore you to death with a huge wall of text here).

We've talked before about the race / class thing in publishing and within picture books in general - and how BAME and working class folk are definitely being squeezed out of things, but that still doesn't give a solid answer why we're still seeing large-scale issues with gender imbalance and of course a lack of BAME / Disabled / working class representation too.

The most upsetting thing from a casual observer's point of view is the fact that the very people who are champing at the bit to make children's books more inclusive are the very folk who often get blamed for the shortfall.

I don't like seeing creatives getting targetted by (well meaning but obviously misinformed) folk who suspect that the issue with the industry imbalance of white / middle class folk vs BAME / Disabled / working class creatives is being perpetuated by writers and illustrators themselves. I don't believe this is the case, though others obviously do and are making a lot of noise about that.

Most creatives actually welcome the opportunity to work on a wide range of diverse subjects and titles and should not be pilloried for the types of characters they include in their books (it's very easy to see why some creatives won't touch anything that deals with human characters at all, preferring to make their stories and points with animals, monsters or - agh - anything but people - but this just exacerbates the problem, it does nothing to kick-start progress on this matter).

We've seen it so many times in articles and thinkpieces on children's books. If kids can't see themselves reflected in the books they read, they won't dig in and fall in love with reading for pleasure - and from that they also won't be as likely to branch out and embrace other cultures and diverse subjects should the opportunity arise.

We've always tried our best to champion diverse titles on the blog (both of us are really passionate about this - even C who, for an 11 year old, thankfully understands why this is so important and always welcomes the opportunity to tackle any new books regardless of the colour, creed, sex, ability or age of the central character - and I guess it's important to say "the central SPEAKING character" at that, not just the stickered-in black / girl / poor friend who barely gets to utter a word).

More needs to be done, and we can all help - at all levels of involvement in kidlit, whether creator or consumer, and the rewards will eventually speak for themselves. We will hopefully have an industry that is future-proof rather than one consumed internally by its own asshole-wallpapering.

Broaden the audience and you'll broaden the sales, broaden the sales and you have more money to put into producing even more wonderful books. paying your creatives better too (and more money to promote a wider range of titles, not just the 'big name' stuff).

Or, y'know, just carry on the way you are and watch the whole industry end up a bland and disinterested money-making operation that eventually collapses in on itself in generations to come.

"I'll be there for you...for a hundred grand a showwwwwwww"

I've finally lost count.

I have, I've honestly lost count of the number of books we've seen for review over the last few years of blogging that have had one core moral at their heart.

Sometimes that moral is delivered with all the subtlety of a breezeblock to the face. Sometimes it's intricately woven within the story and may fool you into seeing the worth in promoting the message, sure. But for us at least, most of them just make us wish picture books would move on and fixate on something else.

The subject of friends seems to be a rich fertile patch of soil that has been worked over, and worked over, and worked over again until now, for us at least, it's now a dry and dusty desert, incapable of sustaining the seed of an original idea.

There are so many ways to show how awesome it can be to be a social gadfly, popular and well loved, cared about, supported. But for kids who struggle to make friends, and for folk who are naturally anxious and a bit socially awkward (HELLO SIR!) these books can end up having the exact opposite effect to the one they intend.

For kids like C, making friends can be pretty tricky. Sometimes kids lack the confidence, the belief in themselves, and perhaps even the communications skills to instantly strike up a rapport with other kids.

Sometimes if they are only children it can be doubly tough as they do not have the experience of having an older / younger sibling at home, and thus do not learn some of the valuable life lessons that come from having a sib who either dotes on you or (in my case at least) is likely to swipe you around the head with a length of hot wheels track for a giggle.

It's easy to cast a critical eye over picture book texts that feel like they're still raking over that dusty patch of desert mentioned above, claiming that they bring absolutely nothing new to the party, but within the (sometimes horrifically predictable) picture book pattern (that I believe will end up being the death of the children's picture book industry if publishers and agents don't do something about it - and fast) these books often follow the same pattern and by GAD if I never see another while we're still running this blog, it'll be too soon.

Let's take a look at that formula. Does this sound like the premise for an exciting original book to you?

1) Central character is either happy or miserable. But could they be happier?
2) Something happens - central character is completely stuck, lost, trapped, lonely etc (cut and paste to suit)
3) They get a friend, make a friend, build a friend, stick batteries into a friend, trap a friend in a gigantic bubble machine accidentally...
4) THEY BECOME AMAZING! They achieve all their goals. All because they made a friend who shows them the true path to enlightenment

Actually I've probably made this formula sound more exciting than it inevitably ends up. In most cases the story pattern is so formulaic you could literally swap in / swap out any animal / human / robot / alien / sentient sea cucumber character and still end up with the same result.

BUT DO THESE BOOKS WORK? Do they really? Do kids read them and instantly have it dawn on them that making friends is great, and they absolutely must do that thing, otherwise they're doomed to failure? I sincerely doubt it, but I would love to hear from folk who talk from the other end of the table and can think of instances where 'friends' books have actually worked, been a positive boon to a child's well being. I do want that, I just don't want so much of it, if that makes sense.

From this year's picture book submissions (lower than most years for us, hovering around the 300 book mark) we've seen roughly 60-70 picture books that contain some or all of the elements above.

The problem is they're so interchangeable, so samey, and so immemorable that it's becoming very difficult to review them - and in fact we've dropped an awful lot of unsolicited review submissions, leaving us with a fairly skeletal schedule for 2019 - something that we're really not used to on the blog (that sounds horribly needy, but usually we're drowning in picture books, and though we do turn a fair few down that are just too young to appeal to C, we seem to be seeing fewer books in general right across the board).

So what to do? I still don't understand why picture books absolutely HAVE TO HAVE A MORAL LESSON IN THERE SOMEWHERE and reading a book creative's recent tweet about wanting to just do a book that had 'a load of meaningless but entertaining chat in it' I really do think we've got a problem that's beginning to eat the entire industry inside out, that publishers and agents really are against taking any form of risk, so play it safe with fairly formulaic and samey old themes.

I don't understand why we don't see more picture books that just want to convey a story without feeling they have to lecture you, or try to fix you, or manipulate you into being a different person than you actually are. It's possible to write those stories, but whether it's possible to sell them for a profit is the real issue I guess.

If kids need anything at the moment, they need picture books and stories that take them away from the pressures they're under in virtually all other aspects of their lives (particularly the pressure to be more sociable, friendly, and have more pals).

Ugh, totally aware that this is one of those horribly cynical groany old ReadItTorials, so apologies if you've stuck through to the bitter end and think I got out of bed the wrong side this morning, but it really is getting to the point where the market is getting flooded with this stuff.

Kids either naturally make friends or they don't - but why should their worth be measured by this?