Julia and the Shark by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, illustrated by Tom de Freston, is truly a thing of beauty in more ways than one but not least because of the way it looks and feels.
The impact of a beautifully produced book can`t be overestimated, especially if it`s a book aimed at young readers. This hardback edition, as one reviewer says, "will redefine what a children`s book can look like".*
The cover, in greys and yellows, with the figure of a girl apparently walking into the centre of a whirlpool, surrounded by wheeling birds and the eponymous shark, magically captures a story which includes issues of fear and loss, seeking and separation and mental health.
Inside, the text is interspersed with similarly evocative images and clever overlays which hide and then reveal their subject, thereby creating a feeling of constant movement, of ebb and flow, of migration and return, all of which feed into Julia`s story.
Movement and change are a central theme of the story. Julia`s father has been commissioned to get a remote lighthouse up and running automatically. Her mother, a scientist who studies algae, "a special kind that cleans the water of any bad chemicals and perhaps one day even breaks up some kinds of plastic," is also keen to make the trip in the hopes of being able to be able to study her first passion: "the biggest things that that lived in the coldest seas" and especially a very special kind of shark - a Greenland shark.
So begins a summer of unravelling secrets, new friendships and understandings, not to mention adventures in stormy waters and a shark "older than trees".
Kiran Millwood Hargrave never writes a bad book but this one is very very special and stays in the mind long after it is finished.
* Katherine Webber Tsang
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