The Best Chip

Author and Illustrator: Kate Leake
Publisher: Macmillan Children's Books, 2006

This is one of my favourite books of all time, and quite possibly  #myinheritancebook. If you like modern poetry or even rap, this is the picture book for you. The rhyme is sublime!  It's fast, fun, tells a fantastic story and covers all manner of emotions (exhilaration, excitement, trepidation, sorrow); it's dynamic and comedic, all in one. 

The story rhyme tells the story of a little girl and her family standing in the queue at the fish and chip shop, then being served their chips, and the little girl savouring their taste, their look and their feel and then dropping her favourite chip in the floor. It looks like certain disaster, but the little girl soon recovers when she's served her other favourite food, ice-cream! 

Kate Leake works mastery over words in this book, it's a huge pleasure to read aloud, it rolls from the tongue. She uses alliteration on the 'ch' sound in the opening few pages, which are soft and lyrical. This sense of hysteria around the ' whopper' chip starts to build mid way through, as we're lead through excitement in the first person by the anticipating girl. The pages are laid out in a fun, engaging manner, comic book-like with capitalisation at random 'impact' moments, words in bubbles and sentences scattered uncouthly around the page, the the reader is forced to work hard for the best read, and I like this. 

In terms of the illustrations, again the lay-out and scale of pictures differ on each page and are stimulating on the eye. The children love trying to follow the read with their fingers, but I read this book so much,  they can't keen up, and it becomes even more fun and frantic in terms of reading and chip eating. 

The book works well if you put a touch of performance in, over playing the loss of the bestest chip, with dramatic sobs. Children from 2-7 years love having this read to them. My only very minor criticisms of the book; there's a lot of mild yellow in the pictures, so not so eye catching, and I sometimes feel it's a page too long ( but mainly only if the 'performance' is especially dramatic!- phew, exhausting!) 

All in all, a really lovely book for sharing with all the family. 

Shifty McGifty and Slippery Sam

Author: Tracey Corderoy 
Illustrator: Steven Lenton 

Five year old boy and three year old girl hugely excited to find this one on Fred's bed tonight, ready to read. Edie (3) calls this 'Gifty McGifty'.  'They steal lots of cakes' she said, though that isn't exactly how the story goes. 
Robber dogs Shifty and Sam are hopeless burgalars; they plan a final heist, this time on their neighbour's houses, inviting the dog neighbours round for cake to make sure they're out in time for the robbery. Turns out they're still hopeless criminals but fantastic bakers, a new careers blossoms. 

This is a fun rhyming story with a great message, bad guys turn good, everyone has the ability to do something well, and saying sorry and changing our ways goes a long way. 
The assortment of dogs is also fun, a sausage dog, a Scottie dog with a cuddly toy, a pink poodle. Nice graphics, block browns, purple, blues and black against pastels.