Our daughter, age seven, will be moving to a new school for year three when we move to Oxford, and she's worried about it. She's a keen reader and I know the right book would make a big impact at this stage. Can you recommend anything either on the topic of the move to a new school or on change generally?
Leslie
Moving house is one of the recurrent themes of children books. It happens so often to children and for such good reasons that in the daily flow of life it is often seen as just "one of those things". However, fiction often gives a very different view: children on the move in stories are far more likely to hate the thought of it and to be anxious although, ultimately, let me quickly assure you, they are very happy with the change. The themes that come up most often consider the loss of giving up roots and the anxieties around being new in school and, especially, finding new friends.
Of course, there are a great many positive stories too, especially if the house has something very special about it like being very old, harbouring a secret or having a wonderful horse/dog/cat next door! Julia Green has just published Tilly's Moonlight Fox, an evocative and touching story about a girl whose house move difficulties are compounded by her mother being laid up in pregnancy. Tilly survives and flourishes by discovering a special garden at the end of the house's regular garden and acquainting herself with a fox. In Lissa Evans's Small Change for Stuart, which is on this year's Carnegie medal shortlist, Stuart moves house and although he expects to be lonely, he quickly finds himself splendid new friends in the shape of the triplets who live next door as well as an pleasingly and unusual adventure.
One of the best moving home stories is David Almond's Skellig which juxtaposes the trauma of moving (and a very ill baby sister) with the satisfaction of meeting a special girl next door and, with her, discovering a magical creature in the garage. Skellig is on the old side for even for a keen seven-year-old reader but it would be a book you could read aloud and share with her. In addition to showing her magical opportunities, the complexities of it would certainly make your daughter think and wonder and imagine and that would distract her from her house-move anxieties.
In general, I think that as keen a reader as your daughter might prefer distraction to an "experience of moving" book. Almost all good stories address change in some way or another and that might, subtly, be just as reassuring. My favourite books for seven-year-olds include EB White's Charlotte's Web and Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie. The first describes all kinds of changes including the whole of life and death within a beautiful and tender story, with a clear message that we grow up and things change but that is all right too. The second is a finely observed story of family life that launches the wonderful series of endless moves that Laura's family make as they cross the US searching for a better way of life.
Since you are moving to Oxford, how about any of the very splendid novels set in Oxford? There's Philip Pullman's Lyra's Oxford, Gillian Avery's The Warden's Niece and, of course, either of the great classics - Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, which is almost Oxford and will certainly give her a wonderful way of looking at and thinking about the river which flows through it.
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