Once a year, a special event occurs – Bookworm Christmas! Or as it is better known, World Book Day, this year taking place on Thursday, March 2nd (with events running throughout the month). Schoolchildren in Ireland and Britain are presented with World Book Day tokens which they can exchange for special €1.50/£1 books or use towards another title. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the initiative, a partnership between a variety of organisations interested in children’s literacy.
It's just a great initiative by the bookselling community: authors, publishers and booksellers – a lovely way to get kids reading, to introduce new authors and books and encourage children and families to discover – or rediscover! – their local bookshop
World Book Day is financed by contributing publishers, National Book Tokens Ltd, and the participating booksellers (who fund the cost of the book token redemption), along with other literacy organisations. Helen Carr, editor at O’Brien Press, elaborates: “The authors donate their work for free and the publishers and booksellers don’t make any money from them (and may lose a bit!). It’s just a great initiative by the bookselling community: authors, publishers and booksellers – a lovely way to get kids reading, to introduce new authors and books and encourage children and families to discover – or rediscover! – their local bookshop. WBD is all about promoting the enjoyment of books and reading.”
Carr edited this year’s Irish World Book Day title, Judi Curtin’s Fast Forward. The O’Brien Press has published a number of WBD titles specifically for the Irish market over the past several years, after approaching the organising body about Irish titles. “We try to think of an author about a year in advance,” she explains. “For example, we already have an author in mind for WBD 2018. We like to tie the World Book Day book in with forthcoming titles/new series etc. We’d hope to both whet existing fans’ appetites for a new book from one of our authors and reach out to children who haven’t read their work before.”
The 9+ age range is particularly popular with WBD readers, so this year’s choice seems obvious: Judi Curtin, whose children’s books, including the bestselling Alice and Megan series, have sold over a quarter of a million copies. Fast Forward focuses on Molly and Beth from Curtin’s Time After Time, the first in a new series about two best friends who can travel through a magic door to the past (as they do in the first instalment) or the future (as they do in this special short story). Curtin has written about time travel in another series, and she prefers magical explanations to the scientific (in her Friends Forever series, a cat with special powers drags the characters back to various historic moments).
“One of my favourite books is The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by CS Lewis,” she says. “I love the dramatic entrance to Narnia via the painting in Eustace’s bedroom. The painting is so realistic, Lucy can almost smell the sea, and Eustace starts to feels seasick.” In Curtin’s series, the “magical entrance” is similarly grounded in the everyday, which in many ways makes it all the more believable. And Molly and Beth travel to moments that affect their own lives, rather than the dates that appear in history books.
“I prefer to have a personal element to the time travelling, with the girls engaging with people they know from their own lives,” Curtin agrees, though adding intriguingly: “They may, however, happen upon historical events while doing this though.”
The second full-length instalment of the series will appear this autumn, but in the meantime this short story will please readers, presenting an insight into a new girl in the protagonists’ class and reminding them of the importance of friendship and kindness, typical themes in Curtin’s work.
Carr comments on the role of WBD stories within an overall series: “I’d think of them as spin-offs from the main series and edit them as a self-contained story – little, stand-alone adventures that happen to them between the main books in the series. They are ‘canon’, though, so if any new characters are introduced or anything like that, I’d file their info away for appearances in future books in the main series!”
The other World Book Day titles tapping into existing franchises include Jacqueline Wilson’s Butterfly Beach (featuring characters from The Butterfly Club); a Horrid Henry title from Francesca Simon, Funny Fact Files; Peppa Loves World Book Day featuring the much-beloved Peppa Pig; Where’s Wally?: The Fantastic Journey; Julia Donaldson and Lydia Monks’s Princess Mirror-belle and Snow White; Claire Freedman and Ben Cort’s Everyone Loves Underpants; and three Famous Five stories from the world of Enid Blyton.
Other bestselling authors have produced new titles for World Book Day: David Walliams, David Almond and Michael Grant have standalone short stories available for older readers. Further information about all World Book Day events and titles can be found at worldbookday.com.
Claire Hennessy is a writer and editor of children's and YA fiction
