Lucy has her dad. Her dad is a very private person. He tells Lucy not to talk about the way they live.
"It's just you and me, Lucy,' ...
Dad said the same thing he'd said
every
time we'd
moved
before.
'It's just you and me, Lucy. We
don't need nobody else."
This text fragment comes from the first two pages of this gentle verse novel. In just two pages we learn Lucy has no mother but we don't yet know what has happened. We learn Lucy frequently moves to new schools but we don't know why. We learn Lucy only has her dad - there is no extended family. We learn that perhaps there is not much money because they only have their old brown car.
Later we learn mum has died and dad has built himself a protective shell to keep others out. But things are about to change. Lucy finds her first new friend - a little snail in the garden of the caravan park where she and her dad live in an old, battered caravan. At her new school, Lucy also makes another friend and in her new class, the teacher is simply wonderful. But poverty makes things hard.
That wearing
someone else's
faded old uniform
and shoes
with their stains
and smells
makes me
want to crawl inside
a shell ...
Then something goes badly wrong. It can no longer just be Lucy and Dad. Others can help. Others will help. Her dad just has to say yes.
As with all verse novels, there is a raw emotional edge to this book. Your heart will break for Lucy but it will soar when you read about the kindness she encounters from her new friend Tahnee, from Tahnee's mum, from the caravan park owner Mei Hui and from her teacher.
The children in Lucy's Year Two class are working on a helpers project. They begin with helping at school; then helping at home (they keep a tally sheet of tasks); the children learn to cook a simple pie to share with their family; then the project extends to clearing up rubbish in the community; and finally everyone joins in with catching cane toads - "You catch. We kill ... kindly." I love the way Kathryn Apel has added the theme of community action but in a really gentle and natural way as a perfect outcome from the class project which the teacher, the aptly named Miss Darling, has carefully designed.
Here is a mystery. I regularly watch Colby Sharp from Michigan in America sharing the opening of hundreds of parcels on his YouTube channel. I am SO envious. Publishers send him such treasures. Last week I had a notification from the Post Office that a parcel was coming. Have you guessed? Yes it was a book and yes it was a free book and yes it was an advance copy from a publisher - so exciting and even better news this is a verse novel (you know I love them) and it is S P L E N D I D! So huge thanks to UQP (University of Queensland Press) and whoever it was that put my name on their mailing list. The dedication lists our IBBY Australia President so perhaps that is who I need to thank.
What Snail Knows will be available on 1st March, 2022. I strongly suggest you add it to your shopping list right now. This book is a perfect package - it has an inviting cover, soft pencil drawings by Mandy Foot scattered throughout and the verse novel format makes this book easily accessible for readers aged 8+. Here is a set of really good teachers notes (but if I was still in my school library I would just put this book into the hands of a sensitive reader rather than dissecting is as a class novel).
If you want to explore the theme of poverty with a younger class my friend from Kinderbookswitheverything has a Pinterest of books linked with the Sustainablity Development Goal One - No Poverty. Here are some other verse novels for younger readers that I highly recommend:
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