SuitabookGrandad’s Island
Benji Davies
- Reading
- Look closely at the illustrations before explaining the story’s meaning. Pause when Grandad chooses to stay, then revisit the final note and invite several interpretations rather than supplying one answer.
- Themes
- Love and memory: Syd and Grandad share a close relationship, and Grandad later appears in a note surrounded by friendly animals. The book presents this favourably.
- Separation and loss: Grandad decides to stay on the island, while Syd returns home alone and enters the quiet house. The story clearly presents separation and missing someone, but whether this represents death, another form of loss or fantasy remains open.
- Imagination and reality: Syd and Grandad travel through an attic door on a ship to a wondrous island with colourful, welcoming creatures. Imaginative travel is presented as a vivid shared experience and a way of expressing the relationship between Syd and Grandad.
- Worth knowing
- Syd returns to a quiet house and misses Grandad, so the emotional weight may lie in absence rather than danger. The indirect ending could invite questions about what has happened.