Older kids will appreciate Shadow Jumper, the story of fourteen-year-old Jack who was born with photosensitive skin – an allergy to sunlight. His condition is so severe that he can’t go outside without covering every inch of himself with creams or clothes – and, as a result, spends most of his time inside, ultra-pale and alone and feeling like a vampire. At school, he can’t join in with sports or break times, which means it’s hard to make friends. But like any other kid his age, he wants to have fun and take risks.
So it is that he goes up to the rooftops at dusk and jumps daringly from shadow to shadow. He knows he’s dicing with death – and not just because of the danger of falling. Even in the twilight, it would only take a glancing contact with the evening rays for him to come up in an angry, fizzing rash.
When, on the rooftops, he meets Beth – an angsty teenager who, with her white make-up and dark eyeliner, looks almost as freakish as him – he feels an instant connection. Together they set out by night bus to find Jack’s missing father, breaking into the lab where he works – and so begins a gradual awareness of the issues with which they both have to contend. It becomes apparent that Jack’s condition worsens under stress and improves when he’s calm and happy; and as he opens up to the important people in his life, his skin starts to heal. This is a story that encourages teens to share the challenges they face with others. After all, how can one’s needs ever be effectively met if other people don’t know what they are?
SEE ALSO: different, feeling • fussy eater, being a • worrying
alone, wanting to be left
Sometimes it helps to be alone. Away from the mêlée, a child can experience their emotions without having to pretend they’re OK. But sometimes a child would rather be rescued from their funk, if only someone would notice. Such is the case for the child with the angry charcoal scribble hovering over her head in The Cloud.
While all the other kids in the art class are filling their canvases with spaceships and giant yellow chicks, the canvas of the girl with the cloud remains resolutely blank. No one dares approach her. But then a girl with a delightfully wonky-eyed portrait on her canvas walks boldly through the charcoal scribble and talks to her. It takes her several attempts, but eventually she engages the cloud girl – and soon they’re combining their skills to make pictures together. The more they produce, the smaller the black cloud gets, until – puff! – it’s gone, and a big, sunny smile appears on the cloud girl’s face instead. Use this sensitive book with a prickly child and, ideally, their peers. Its message of patience, persistence and acceptance will help show everyone how he or she might be drawn out.
Sometimes a child wants to be alone because they’ve cottoned on to the fact that you can feel more truly alive when you’re by yourself. Kevin Henkes introduces this concept with impressive minimalism, setting the sketchy figure of a boy against semi-abstract watercolour landscapes in All Alone. ‘Sometimes I like to live alone, all by myself,’ it begins – the choice of the verb ‘to live’, rather than ‘to be’, immediately elevating us to the level of poetry. When the boy walks in the woods by himself, he can ‘hear more and see more’. He notices the way the trees sigh in the wind. He feels the heat of the sun on his skin. Many adults never learn to enjoy being alone like this. Use it to introduce solitude as a positive concept, and you’ll give a child a key to contentment in life.
For older children, wanting to be left alone takes on new, hormonal angles which are hard for the grown-up to interpret and even harder for the adolescent to explain (see: adolescence; hormones, raging). The bedroom door stays shut for hours on end and excuses are given for not joining in with family activities. Todd, the hero of The Knife of Never Letting Go – the first in Patrick Ness’s excellent Chaos Walking trilogy – feels the need to escape the company of others more than most, living as he does on a planet where everyone can, literally, hear one another’s thoughts. Surrounded day and night by ‘All the Noise that men spill outta themselves, all their clamour and clatter’ which comes ‘at you and at you and at you’, it’s not surprising that Todd has started taking long walks on the lonely marshes with his dog, Manchee, to try and find some peace. Even here, he still has Manchee’s thoughts to contend with, though they are somewhat basic in content and expression (‘Need a poo, Todd’; ‘Hungry, Todd.’)
While he’s trying to limit his exposure to Noise, and avoid whatever it is the older men have in store for him – a vague menace lurking around his imminent transition to ‘manhood’ – he stumbles across something unexpected. No women have existed on this planet since a virus wiped them out; and yet, here on the marshes, Todd finds cause to question this assumption . . . Teenagers will relate to Todd’s need for privacy – and also to the joy of one day finding someone with whom to share their innermost thoughts.
SEE ALSO: different, feeling • friends, feeling that you have no • friends, finding it hard to make • heard, not feeling • loner, being a • moodiness • trauma
anger
Over time, we learn to control the primal urge to shout, scream or hit – but it’s not a skill we’re born with. And if a child is exposed to peers, older siblings or grown-ups who express their rage inappropriately, or who never express it at all, a story can be a brilliant way to bring healthy role models into the house. When Sophie Gets Angry – Really, Really Angry . . . shows what happens during an outbreak of red-hot temper – and a way of calming oneself down.
At first glance, the deceptively simple illustrations might be the handiwork of a child with a fat brush and poster paints: here is Sophie and her sister, with flat circles for faces, dots for eyes, and a red daub for the mouth. But their artfulness soon makes its impact. When her sister snatches her toy gorilla and so triggers her anger, Sophie’s face takes up the whole page, huge and there. And when her anger erupts, Sophie’s entire body sizzles with a jagged, red outline. When she runs out of the house, everything else starts to sizzle too – the slammed door, the trees, a squirrel – as if absorbing her projected upset. In time her anger starts to burn itself out, and her outline dims to orange. But it’s only when she finds an old beech tree – its gnarled branches spiralling up with a cool, blue aura – that it ebbs away completely. By the time she goes back inside her outline has faded to yellow, matching the rest of her family’s outlines – all of whom are now quietly getting on with other things and are glad to see her back. This story shows that anger is natural – and that it’s possible to deal with it by yourself without hurting other people’s feelings.
Children