Kate Milner's Reading List

"It’s a book about a row of houses and the characters who live there; children, adults and the elderly. One day, this community wins an awful lot of money on the football pools. It changes them—some in good ways, but others not so good. The nice people get even nicer, and those who were mean and crotchety before get even more mean and crotchety. The last person on the row of cottages is a man who runs a bicycle shop. Winning the money really doesn’t change him very much at all; he just gets on with his life and mends the children’s bicycles. This book is very much of its own time—it was published in 1974. But I love it for the fantastic illustrations. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s a story that you might not get now because it concentrates on the adults. I think it’s so good show to children today because it demonstrates another perspective.It reminds me of another world. The story is told by the children looking in on these grown-ups and the odd ways they behave. It’s also an urban environment, which you don’t often see in picture books anymore—it’s a rare look at an ordinary working community. It’s line-drawing basically—different weights of line. You’ve got some very thin spidery lines, and then you’ve got some strong, wide lines. He gets a huge amount of variety just from line-drawing."

"I think Shaun Tan is absolutely amazing. In The Lost Thing he creates a whole world, and in this case it’s a barmy world. It’s so rich in detail. There’s a sense of this being a real other world that you’re allowed to look into. It’s about a boy finding a lost creature on a beach. The boy decides to take it home. Eventually he sets it free again. A less imaginative illustrator may have made this story cute and the situation comforting. Instead, Shaun Tan gives us a massive thing that’s half sea creature, half machine. It is an imaginative book—full of energy—it is also magical, almost gothic. “It is an imaginative book—full of energy—it is also magical, almost gothic.” He’s fantastic. I love another book by him called The Arrival as well. But I picked this because it opened my eyes to what you could do in this format. It’s easy to think that children’s picture books should be quite safe and prescribed. But then you look at a book like The Lost Thing and you get the feeling that anything is possible."

"It’s wild, isn’t it? It addresses the concept of time for kids. But instead of showing clocks and hours and minutes, it talks about different things that you can observe changing over time. Like, “Fringes cover your eyes, because they grow. And, how eyes slowly get used to the dark.” It captures that sense of growing and changing, mostly from a child’s point of view. Yes. Reading it makes you think about things differently. That sense that you get when you realise things have changed—your hair’s grown, or you’ve worked out how to do something that you didn’t know how to do a week ago. It’s very much about change and growing up but told in a very immediate and tactile way. I love the image-making. It’s very smart, full of daring colour contrasts, and bold. I find it intriguing. I’m looking at the page now where it says, “Computers. All computers get slower.” This is about the real experience of children. I feel quite strongly that what we ought to be doing in children’s books is exploring what life is like for real children these days, which does mean screens and mobile phones. It means all sorts of things that we didn’t think about 30 years ago. And part of what people should be doing in picture books is helping children negotiate all these new technologies. “I feel quite strongly that what we ought to be doing in children’s books is exploring what life is like for real children these days, which does mean screens and mobile phones.” This book is a combination of some really smart modern graphics, and a well-observed text about change and what it feels like. It’s relevant. It’s exciting to see something that different from the mainstream—there’s so often a tendency to just distract everybody with farmyard animals. If you look at the number of picture books about farmyard animals, it’s huge, whereas the number of books about mobile phones and computers is tiny. But for real children there’s an awful lot more screens than there are farmyard animals. I’m not at all the first to say this, but there is also a need for picture books aimed at older children—not just for the five year old to help them learn to read, but to help older children explore more complex experiences. I’m particularly thinking about social media. I’d love to get somebody to commission me for this."

"This was the book that was in my head when I was child. I like to remember the effect that a book has on you when you are young. I used to have nightmares about this book, about the cat in the hat. It’s exciting and creepy at the same time. I was looking at it again the other night. There’s so much fear and fret in it, and that sense that you know the mother’s coming back. Will there be time to clean up the mess? And the cat is alarming—I mean, you are never quite sure about him. Yes! He could do leave you with a horrendous mess that’ll get you into terrible trouble. He’s no fairy godmother. He isn’t going to wave his wand and sort everything out. The children are running around, nervously trying to control it. There’s so much anxiety in it. But, of course, it does get resolved. And mum comes back, and it’s all fine. It gives me a knot in my stomach thinking about it—I think that it’s funny that that this doesn’t put me off the book. It’s also brilliantly drawn—that use of line, the spot colour. Because print technology was different then, he has two colours and black and the white paper. He has to make so much use of each colour. I absolutely think that you do better work if you limit yourself. I can open up Photoshop, and do anything. But each project needs some limits so that you test yourself, so you push yourself. Of course, once you’ve set the rules, you have to break them a bit and push them around. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I’m looking at an illustration now of the cat. He’s got a tray balanced on one foot, an umbrella, a boat, a fish, and a cake. Plus a couple of books. And he’s on a ball! The exuberance and the sheer energy of it is just fantastic. The rhyme and the repetition give it even more momentum and energy. It’s tremendous. I love the energy. I love the chaos."

"I follow all of Dave McKean’s stuff, and I think he is wonderful. In this book, Neil Gaiman’s writing works really well. I could just read the text and enjoy imagining everything for myself because the writing is so wonderful. It’s essentially a story about how the dad of the title remains completely unconcerned as he’s swapped and moved and replaced. He doesn’t notice; you never see his face; it’s always behind a newspaper. Essentially, that’s the joke. It’s a bit like the Shaun Tan, it’s so rich. There’s so much going on: the use of texture, the line in it, they’re all fantastic. So are the sense of space and perspective in the illustration. Then, completely randomly, it introduces a character called the Queen of Menanicia—she turns up, says hello and is never referred to again! It’s exciting and playful. I love the story. I love the characters. But combined with those visuals—it just grabs you. Sign up here for our newsletter featuring the best children’s and young adult books, as recommended by authors, teachers, librarians and, of course, kids."