Festive books to delight younger readers
Three festive books for young readers to enjoy this Christmas.
- ’Twas the Match Before Christmas
- By Julianne McKeigue, illustrated by Brian Fitzgerald
- O’Brien Press
- €12.99
’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through Croke Park It was quiet and peaceful; the great pitch was dark.
The biggest and most magical mystery surrounding Christmas is how Santa manages to deliver presents to children all over the world in the space of just one night.
And this year, as if he and the elves hadn’t enough to be doing on Christmas Eve, it seems they have time to stop and play a game of Gaelic football in Croke Park. Sure why not?
Jenny, security guard at GAA HQ, gets a bit of a fright when, while locking up at midnight on December 24, she spots a man kitted out in red and wearing football boots.
Could this be a rare sighting of the Cork senior team in Croke Park, we hear you ask? No — instead, trotting out onto the pitch is a reindeer squad, ready to ‘sleigh’ the opposition, which is made up entirely of Santa’s elves.
Despite it being the season of goodwill, there is no question of this yule-rules clash being a friendly fixture and as the reindeer set about breaking down the elf-defence mechanism, Jenny is plunged into the thick of the action as referee.
“Some elves had their hats pulled down over their eyes; and both of the teams clocked up seventeen wides. There were reindeer with antlers all tangled in nets. Poor Jenny was fearful they might need the vets.”
More Christmas chaos ensues when Dancer the reindeer takes flight in pursuit of the ball and earns himself a red card, while Comet gets shown a yellow for nibbling Croker’s hallowed turf.
Author Julianne McKeigue, whose job as events, education, and retail manager at the GAA Museum offers a hint as to her passion for Gaelic games, has scored a winner with this festive flight of fancy whose catchy rhyming verse pays homage to the Clement Clarke Moore original.
- The Great Irish Biodiversity Book
- By Éanna Ní Lamhna, illustrated by Barry Falls
- Gill Books
- €24.99
Make it a great big bio-diverse Christmas with biologist and broadcaster Éanna Ní Lamhna’s latest giant-sized contribution to the wildlife wisdom of Irish readers.
Barry Falls’ intricately-observed illustrations are bursting with life as Ní Lamhna explores woodland, bog, river, grassland, and garden.
Introducing plants, animals, and ‘decomposers’ in each habitat, she leads young readers on an undercover adventure to meet woodlice and slugs feeding at night on decaying vegetation.
She rummages in hedgerows and finds Natterer’s bats feasting on moths, while ‘burying’ beetles dig holes under a dead bird, laying their eggs in the corpse and covering it with soil until their young emerge to feast on the carcass.
Delving deeper into nature’s delights, she examines the droppings of pine martens that have been gorging on wild cherries.
The following nugget of information, however, may be the one that children who receive the book as a gift will have the most fun regurgitating to delighted family members over the Christmas dinner.
“Long-eared owls and kestrels swallow their food — mice and rats — whole. Later, they cough up all the bones and fur they couldn’t digest in a pellet... If you find one of those, you can take it home and tease it out to see all the little bones of their meal.” Mmm, delicious!
And for curious children whose appetites are now whetted, there’s lots more lovely, icky grossness amid the fascinating facts in this wide-ranging introduction to some of Ireland’s hidden habitats.
It’s an attractive and informative addition to Gill’s ‘Great Irish’ series, whose topics range from weather to politics and GAA, while for those who prefer their bite-size information in slightly smaller book format, new from the same publishers is Jackie McCann’s Ireland in Numbers (€19.99).
Dermot Flynn’s illustrations bring to life census statistics such as the fact that people in Cork attend hospital less often than the rest of the country, and that there are roughly two million more cows than humans in the Republic of Ireland.
The same, though, is not true of the North, where there are 1.675 million cattle and 1.9 million people. So now we know.
- Where to Hide a Star
- By Oliver Jeffers
- HarperCollins
- €15.99
We’ve enjoyed Oliver Jeffers’ talking crayons and his group-thinking Hueys, but the return of the boy and the penguin who starred in the Northern Irish author-illustrator’s first picture books is for many readers a very welcome Christmas bonus.
Twenty years after the release of , the nameless boy is still looking at the world from new perspectives and now renews acquaintance with his friend the Martian. Indeed, who better to call upon when you need help to track down a missing star?
The trouble starts when boy, star, and penguin are playing one of their regular games of hide-and-seek in which “the boy mostly did the seeking, as he was the only one who could count”.
The star, being a star, isn’t great at hiding either, so is normally very easy to find, while the penguin has a favourite hiding place, which means that the boy knows exactly where to look.
Except on the occasion when the penguin gets stuck in this favourite hiding place, precipitating a chain of events which culminates in the apparent disappearance of the star.
The boy’s first thought is that the star has simply started a new game of hide-and-seek, although it has never previously been this good at concealment.
Therefore, after checking behind the chair and under the sofa, he decides to radio for the assistance of the Martian, who launches a spaceship rescue mission that takes boy and penguin to the North Pole.
This proves interesting in a number of ways. Firstly, Jeffers appears to have found a solution to an issue that has long troubled picture-book illustrators: If, for reasons of artistic preference, you wish to paint/draw penguins at the North Pole, where they do not belong, the answer is to get them there by spaceship.
Then there’s the matter of where this journey takes the reader. The boy, who in previous adventures gave us plenty to ponder about friendship and finding what we think we’re looking for, now discovers that someone else shares his dream of having a star as a friend.
The resulting dilemma around holding onto your dreams without depriving someone else of theirs is played out so subtly that the story works equally on child and adult levels.
While Jeffers can whizz a penguin to the North Pole on a Martian spaceship in one giant leap of childlike imagination, readers of this long-awaited sequel may also reflect on how, for those who look in the right place “the star had always been easy to find”.
BOOKS & MORE
Check out our Books Hub where you will find the latest news, reviews, features, opinions and analysis on all things books from the Irish Examiner's team of specialist writers, columnists and contributors.
