Squirrel and Bird
Laura Baker and Stacey Thomas
Little Tiger

Squirrel and Bird are best friends and the external narrator introducing them emphasises their difference: ‘Squirrel is loud! Very LOUD!’ Bird, on the other hand, ‘hardly makes a sound at all.’ ‘Squirrel is busy. Busy, busy, busy!’ Bird though, ‘prefers to sit and do nothing.’ This way of describing them really annoys Bird as the comments are not the whole picture – far from it.

As the friends prepare for a concert to be held in front of the entire forest, tension mounts and eventually the feathered creature has heard enough and lets the narrator know in no uncertain terms. “ENOUGH!” comes the angry cry. ‘We are not only what you say we are. There’s so much more to us than that.’

Feeling the rebuke, the narrator shows a degree of surprise and has to agree ‘Bird is LOTS of things … and Squirrel is too!’

With Laura Baker’s very effective minimal text and Stacey Thomas’s charmingly detailed, muted sepia and grey scenes, the vital message comes through clearly: we are all an amalgam of different things at different times and hasty judgements are foolish.

A thought-provoking book to share and talk about with primary classes, possibly in a circle time session.