By Leo Timmers/Jutta Bauer
Miranda Harcourt & Stuart McKenzie
Gecko Press/South Coast Press
$17/$14/$20 | Reviewed by Laura Fergusson

TRANSLATED from the Flemish by Bill Nagelkerke, Who’s Driving provides an interactive reading experience for the very young. Each page presents a new vehicle, and the reader (or listener) is asked to guess which animal might be driving it. Plain backgrounds allow the detail of the animals and their transport to stand out, and the illustrations are colourful and lively. The answers – based on clothing, such as a safari suit for the jeep-driving hippopotamus, or a fireman’s uniform for the elephant in the fire engine – are usually logical enough, although my boyfriend (aged 29) disputed the choice of the pig as the tractor driver. He pronounced the book to be ‘great’, however, and its repetition and the capacity for audience participation will be popular with toddlers... as well as the occasional older reader.

CANNILY released just in time for Christmas, Selma will be cropping up in stockings across the country. Inoffensively gimmicky and appealingly produced, it presents a sheep called Selma who is so satisfied with her simple routine of eating grass, playing with her children and sleeping that she wouldn’t change a thing if offered more time or $1 million. While reviewers in the States have proclaimed it “a mother’s book, which serves to bring us the perspective we sometimes need in our busy lives”, I’d imagine a harassed parent, who can’t remember what ‘a nice long sleep’ feels like, would be more likely to find it smugly irrelevant to them, being about a sheep who doesn’t have to juggle a career and screaming children, and whose food grows in front of her. But then I’m not a mother. Evidently a satisfied sheep hits the spot for some of them.

WHILE it’s difficult not to see Miranda’s Alphabet as a vanity project for actor and director Miranda Harcourt, whose photographs, together with her daughter Thomasin McKenzie and toddler William Gould illustrate each page, it offers a formula for learning to read which is innovative and attractively presented. Each letter is defined by its shape in order to fix the sound and sign in a child’s mind – with a distinction made between capital and lower case letters to acknowledge that they frequently bear little relation to each other. So capital G becomes a ‘giant grin’ (demonstrating also the different sounds that can be made by the same letter), while small g is a goldfish bowl. These concepts are drawn around each letter, while photographs of Harcourt and the children responding to them bring the pages to life and draw readers in. The illustrations by Paul Densem are vibrant and entertaining, and the connections with each letter are, or the most part, clear and memorable. A corresponding wall chart is also available.