Do you ever wonder what that blur behind your eyes might be when you are caught in a tricky situation? It just might be fidders going about their business, though as they are invisible to the adult human eye you will never know for sure.
Fidders are the central characters in Mary Murphy’s assured debut novel for confident readers. The Minute Minders (Pushkin Children’s, 8+, £8.99) follows a father-daughter team as they try to make life better for Sandra May, whose parents have had to send her to live with an aunt as they can’t afford to feed and clothe her. Stevie isn’t really supposed to be involved, because she hasn’t yet been trained, but Stevie is the type of child who just can’t let an impulse go.
The miniature world that Murphy builds in parallel to our own is wonderfully detailed, and the black and white pencil sketches add significantly to the storytelling. If The Minute Minders seems at first to be a tribute to Mary Norton’s classic little people legend The Borrowers, Murphy moves well beyond the inspiration to craft an original story full of compassion and great ideas for helping others.
Murphy made her name with her award winning illustrated picturebooks, which number almost 50. Murphy has a second book publishing this spring, I Love You (Happy Yak, 2+, £7.99) a glossy spread for very young readers, with bright bold pictures and a gentle rhyming text. The simple story is based around the various expressions of love a parent panda finds for its little cub, professing passion as full as “a bowl of juicy berries”, as soft and winsome as the fluff on a dandelion clock. It is the perfect book for cuddling up with a toddler on a cold spring day. Who wouldn’t love that?
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Splash, one of two penguin protagonists in Sheena Dempsey’s graphic novel Pablo and Splash (Bloomsbury, 6+, £8.99) ‚isn’t sure what he wants any more. He is sick of the ice and krill on offer in the Antarctic. In fact, he’d actually like to take a holiday from the cold, somewhere “Fun! Warm! Different! Exciting!” When they are captured by the mad scientist Professor O’Brain, Splash gets his wish, as O’Brain teleports the penguin pair back in time. Prehistory was a lot warmer than they were expecting, but they also have to reckon with dinosaurs. With vivid full colour spreads, Dempsey’s book is a confident entry into a growing market for illustrated early readers.
Steve Webb’s graphic novel Peng and Spanners (Faber, £9.99, 6+) also features a penguin as its lead character, although Peng is slightly less full of joie de vivre than Splash. Maybe that’s because he has just been sent away to Boredin Boarding School. However, on his first day he makes friends with a DIY whizz cat called Spanners, which makes life a little more interesting. In this first instalment of their adventure, the unlikely pair embark upon a quest to find the school’s missing pizza shop. Sarcastic quips and surreal plot twists make Peng and Spanners an odd but sure-fire hit, with how-to-draw instructions at the end enhancing its appeal.
Aileen Cusk, Ireland’s first veterinary surgeon, might have had some reassuring advice to offer the adventurous penguins in both Webb and Dempsey’s books. Cusk is the subject of Wonder-Vet by Jennifer Farley (Beehive, 5+, £7.99), which charts the gender-defying journey of Cusk as she tries to become a practising vet in the early 20th century, when women were excluded from the profession. It is an inspiring story that reaches across Europe, where Cusk tended injured horses on battlefields, reinforcing the importance of persistence and the rewards of taking care of others. The picture book is illustrated by Cusk in full colour, with particular attention paid to the various dogs that appear throughout the pages.
Resilience and empathy are key themes in Pádraig Kenny’s latest novel for confident readers, Stitch (Walker Books, £7.99, 8+). Inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Stitch is a gothic adventure with two monsters as its main characters: Stitch and Henry, “crude assemblages of odds and ends with no consistency of form” in the words of evil Professor Hardacre, who takes over the creaky old castle where Stitch and Henry live when their creator suddenly dies. But who defines monsters? That is the questioned asked by Hardacre’s assistant, Alice, and her compassion empowers Stitch to define himself by his deeds rather than his physicality. There are many powerful themes explored through the various characters in Kenny’s sophisticated novel: most effectively the idea of difference and what it means to be a good friend. Kenny has lots of fun crafting the language of his “excitabubble” man-made protagonists too, with prose popping in short chapters that will widen the writer’s usual appeal to a slightly younger age group.
Finally, in Gealach agus Grian (Futa Fata, 10.99, 3+) by Muireann Ní Chíobháin, with illustrations by Brian Fitzgerald, Sol and Luna are brother and sister rowing over who gets their choice of bedtime story Luckily Mam has the perfect one, which sets the siblings as main characters in the sky, learning to live in co-operative harmony: “Tá spás do bheirt thuas sa spéir.”
