10 books featuring child-like creatures

For someone who not only writes and illustrates books for children, but has also taught the subject for the better part of twenty years, you would think that I would have a more exhaustive knowledge of what has been published in that time. 

However, I, like many of my peers, students and colleagues, remain stubbornly lost in a world of my own making and seldom peek outside it. 

Having said all that, books with small, child-like creatures seem to be what my mind defaults to, all else being equal, and I find myself drawn to work full of these sorts of characters. 

There are popular classics that everyone should know, the Moomins being right at the top. I like creatures that require you to see a picture of them before you can properly grasp what they are. A Moomin is a perfect example of this. You only need see one picture of a Moomin to know you want to spend more time with them. 

Dr Seuss spent most of his career making up words and the creatures that fit them. We have Lorax and Knox and Sam-I-Am and a host of others. It is possible that the word ​‘nerd’ comes from his work. If so, he even named the sort of creature I am! What a triumph to have added so many words to the popular consciousness. We could use fewer Thneeds and more Loraxes right now. 

Others that come to mind from the very well-known are the Mr Men and Little Miss stories, creatures all, though somewhat confusingly called Men. 

I loved these as a child, but I find that I don’t really enjoy the stories themselves anymore. The pictures however have lost none of their appeal and to judge by their presence on shelves, the stories continue to find new audiences to this day. 

That doesn’t seem to be the case for the Barbapapa stories. The shape shifting family of multi-coloured blobs are less popular now, but the stories still hold up. I like Barbapapa’s School especially. It has a lot in common with my upcoming book, King School. They are worth rediscovering if you had forgotten about them. They are still fairly easy to track down. 

The great Sir Quentin Blake has drawn many a creature in his time. The shape-shifting Zagazoo might be eligible for this list. Not quite qualifying but always worth rereading are any of his collaborations with Russell Hoban. I try to mention them any time I get the chance. Rosie’s Magic Horse and Monsters both have creatures in them (if a multitude of sentient ice-lolly sticks can be called a creature – they would certainly believe they could). 

Both are tremendous works that deserve to be read more widely. Likewise, read anything by William Steig. His characters come close to being creatures, Sylvester spends half of Sylvester and the Magic Pebble being a rock and sentient animals and objects are all over his work. They don’t fit the strict definition I have in my mind, with the possible exception of Shrek, but they are great works of children’s literature. 

Looking at more contemporary stories, Little Echo by Al Rodin is a perfect example of a child-like creature. The story is beautifully illustrated and full of just the right amount of danger and thrills to balance out the warmth and tenderness at its heart. A great book. 

Wild by Emily Hughes is a modern classic with a central character who is not really a creature but not altogether happy with being a cut-and-paste human being either. If you haven’t read this one by now you probably should. 

Daisy Hirst has built her whole career on creature books. The favourite in our family is Alphonse That Is Not Ok To Do. If you spend much time around children, it isn’t hard to see us as the wild creatures we once were, as Wild also shows. Daisy Hirst’s world of monster/​children captures this perfectly, with them struggling to learn how to behave in a world full of rules and older siblings with treasured possessions you should not eat. 

In a similar vein, Chris Haughton’s book Shh! We have a Plan, has protagonists that we assume are human, but they are so stylised as to become more like creatures than the animals they are hunting… and perhaps that’s the point. 

Often, when an author or illustrator creates a character that is neither human nor animal but something in between, they are asking us to put aside our narrow view of who we are and what we could be, and to think more openly about what we might be, underneath the surface we think we know. 

It is very silly that we allow questions of superficial appearance to continue to divide us so deeply. Creating characters that sit between familiar forms, neither altogether one thing nor another, puts us closer to the world that children still inhabit, where nothing is fixed and everything is still possible. 

I had one friend who wanted to be a pigeon when she grew up, another who wanted to be a fruit garden. I like dreams like this. I hope there will always be stories full of Moomins and Loraxes and Alphonses and Echoes for children and adults alike to enjoy. 

King School by Alexis Deacon is out now.