This is the third in a series from the celebrated illustrator Sam Usher — if you like this, try its predecessors, Snow and Rain (I wonder if he’ll bother doing Hail?).
It begins with a boy’s weather check. “When I woke up it was sunny. It was the hottest day of the year,” says the bright little fellow, which leads to a plan. The day is “hotter than broccoli soup” and the “Atacama Desert”, he observes (it’s in South America). Grandad — who looks like a distinguished Radio 4 presenter in crumpled linen and half-moon specs — is on childcare duty and cheerily declares it the perfect day for an “adventure”.
They gather the “necessary provisions”, and children, who in my experience like lists almost as much as newspaper editors, will enjoy running through these essentials: juice, torch, water, hat, sandwich, grapes, compass, pirate and monkey toy-friends etc — all drawn with Usher’s cheerful pen.
Roles are allocated — the boy gets the “lookout”, Grandad bags “navigator” — and they leave the house (probably Grandad’s, to judge from its grand front door; let’s hope he doesn’t lose it to social-care fees) in search of the perfect picnic spot, which allows Usher a glorious spread of bright blue sky as the sun beats down. Factoring in plenty of rests for Grandad, they gambol on until they come to a cave. Oh good, we think, this has all been a bit nice; when are they going to die of thirst or get eaten by badgers?
Drama limps in, in the form of a gang of rather wet pirates, who got to the perfect spot first. Rather than fighting the pair to the death, they invite them for a picnic on their pirate ship (drawn with exquisite detail, nevertheless). My four-year-old son definitely doesn’t want his pirates to have read Debrett’s — and switched off right away.
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As with so many picture books for this age, the artwork is superb, but the story — no baddies, no jeopardy, no suspense — is the drizzly end of an otherwise sunny day.
Sun (3-plus) by Sam Usher, Templar, 40pp, £6.99
