A Boy Called Book
Vincent Ralph and Aaron Cushley
Scholastic

When a mother and father decide to call their newborn baby Book, it bothers a variety of people and puzzles the little boy he becomes. One day he asks his mum, “Why am I Book?” “Because your life is a story … You can write it however you want,” comes the reply.

First Book decides to become an adventure story, full of exciting chapters. When he turns four, Book starts school but for him, this feels like being part of a scary story. Until that is, his mum’s mention of heroes and being brave leads to Book making his very first friend.

A friend who loves to have fun and laugh a lot – a joke book.

Gradually Book learns such a lot that he aspires to become an encyclopaedia but not all his book types bring him happiness; he also faces sadness, loss (an emptiness inside) but then he receives a special something in the post that makes him forget his sad feelings for a while. So too do pictures of different kinds and gradually back come Book’s smiles. Eventually Book sees that his life is much more than a book; it’s an entire library and one that will keep on growing and growing …

Vincent Ralph’s picture book author debut is an unusual and powerful one that shows the power of story to shape us, inspire us and also to heal us. Powerful too are Aaron Cushley’s scenes of the boy’s developing competences and supportive family life.
On a similar theme is

Reading Together
Robert Broder and Melissa Larson
Blue Star Press

Having an adult or two in your life who are passionate about reading and share books with their baby from the outset, will likely set that infant on the road to becoming a reader and lover of books and stories too. So it is for the mother and father narrators of this book who read to their little one from birth. We are party to various developmental stages such as sitting up and eating solid food, alongside various kinds of books – an abc, flap books the child can manipulate independently, books of nursery rhymes. We see how stories come to life on the page with their elements seemingly becoming a part of the home environment too.

We see too the joys of visiting a bookshop and coming out with arms full of new picture books to enjoy together at every opportunity, so much so that after reading and loving them so much they needed to be mended; books such as wordless ones, rhyming ones and fairy tales. Sometimes no book at all was needed, instead a story would be co-created using family members’ imaginations.

Such was the power of all this book/story experience that eventually two readers in the family become three as the child grows up to be an independent reader herself. Job done, you might say; hopefully not, for confident solo readers too should have stories read to them and I suspect it was so in this family.

Melissa Larson’s portrayal of family life in this household certainly shows how memories are created and emphasises the importance of sharing books together right from the start. What a wealth of connections are created by so doing.