Best books for children this Easter

There’s a retro feel to many of this year’s picture books for under-fives. So if you’re drawn to the midcentury design and palette of Clement Hurd (Goodnight Moon) or Dahlov Ipcar (The Wonderful Egg, I Like Animals, both reissued last year), you may find something in these titles that appeals.

Stanley’s Plan (Tate, £9.99) by Ruth Green is a simple rhyming story that takes its influence from this period. It’s about a dog, Stanley, whose bouncy spirit and good cheer owes something to Pongo from the Disney animation of One Hundred and One Dalmatians. “Stanley the dog is always hungry,” we are told. “Something smells tasty, what can it be?” And then we follow Stanley as he sniffs out a pie in the kitchen and sets about trying to get at it – with help from a cat, a spider, a mouse, a snail and an owl, who entreats him, wisely, to “wait and see”. It turns out the pie is his birthday treat. These expressive screen-prints will appeal to toddlers, as will the simple rhymes – though can someone explain to me why Stanley goes from brown to white and back again?

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Sophy Henn’s Pom Pom Gets the Grumps (Puffin, £10.99) tells the story of a panda who gets out of bed under a cloud. Nothing is right, from his soggy cereal to the birds chirping noisily in the trees on the way to nursery. It’s a feeling familiar to all of us, of course, and the story is a good introduction to a discussion of emotions with a child. Henn’s cast of animal friends is charmingly drawn, and the range of feelings she conveys in the character of Pom Pom, with the smallest of marks, is broad.

^{A spread from Pom Pom Gets the Grumps by Sophy Henn (Puffin)}

Finally for this age group, a rhyming alphabet book about birds that takes you from the albatross to the zosteropidae. The rhymes in Beautiful Birds (Flying Eye, £14.99) by Jean Roussen and Emmanuelle Walker can be forced, but it is visually stunning, each spread enlivened with a dash of hot pink.

Humour is often key in getting children to persevere with a story, especially when they’re reading it for themselves. Tom McLaughlin’s The Accidental Prime Minister (OUP, £6.99, for six-plus) dramatises a common fantasy for many of us – what we might do if we were Prime Minister. A clip of our boy hero, Joe, showing him speaking his mind to the PM during a school visit, goes viral. McLaughlin skirts over the mechanism of how Joe is catapulted into Downing Street, focusing instead on the lunacy of his policy plans involving lie-ins and theme parks and swimming pools on trains. The voice in this first novel is fresh, if it’s occasionally overwritten, and the moral – that we could all use a bit more fun in our lives – is a good one.

^{A spread from Beautiful Birds by Jean Roussen and Emmanuelle Walker (Flying Eye)}

A strong new series – already on to book three – is Supercat by Jeanne Willis and Jim Field, about a cat who develops superpowers after eating a bit of his boy owner’s smelly, chip-smeared sock lurking under the bed. Supercat vs the Pesky Pirate (HarperCollins, £5.99) is James’s latest adventure with his superhero pet against the mad mathematician Count Backwards (disguised this time as Art C Swackbound) and the Calculator Crew. It’s fast-paced, and full of bad jokes – about maths, no less. (A hypotenuse or a hippopotamus, anyone?)

If your child prefers fact to fiction, why not try two large-format picture books? The Story of Life (Frances Lincoln, £12.99) by Catherine Barr, Steve Williams and Amy Husband is a simple, well-illustrated account of evolution; and Nature’s Day (Wide Eyed Editions, £14.99) by Kay Maguire and Danielle Kroll, takes readers on a tour of the seasons. There might even be something here to kick-start an outdoors adventure during the Easter holidays.

^{A spread from The Story of Life by Catherine Barr, Steve Williams and Amy Husband (Frances Lincoln)}

For readers of nine and up, I’ve picked three different kinds of novel. Arsenic for Tea (Corgi, £6.99) is the second in Robin Stevens’s Wells and Wong mystery series, a feelgood blend of Malory Towers and Cluedo in which our two girl detectives, the alpha female Daisy Wells and her more sensitive sidekick Hazel Wong, newly arrived in England from Hong Kong, have a murder to solve. The first mystery was set in their boarding school, Deepdean, and involved the death of a teacher; the story this time has been transposed to Daisy’s country pile during the Easter holidays, and it is not a teacher but the flirtatious poseur Mr Curtis who is at the centre of the plot. Stevens has upped her game in this new volume: her cast of suspects is more distinct and fleshed out, and the girl detectives have properly come into their own as living, breathing characters.

It’s hard to do comedy well for slightly older children, but Frank Cottrell Boyce has cracked it again with a fast-paced adventure about a boy who turns green. In The Astounding Broccoli Boy (Macmillan, £10.99) Rory and his nemesis, the school bully, are thrown together in the seclusion unit of a hospital after both mysteriously change colour. How and why this happened, and where their superpowers have come from, is what the novel sets out to address. It’s a rallying cry for the power of difference; as Rory discovers, “the thing that makes you different is the thing that makes you astounding”.

Finally, for confident readers of 10-plus, the second volume in Jonathan Stroud’s exceptional series Lockwood and Co has arrived in paperback. In The Whispering Skull (Corgi, £7.99), London is yet again awash with spectral visitations, with which our shambolic team of psychic child detectives must do daily battle. Stroud’s writing is inventive and funny, but be warned: this is packed with grisly ghouls and is not perhaps for the faint-hearted.