What Are You Looking For?

Expect a brief, interactive house tour: familiar objects lead from room to room, while a ghost remains visible to readers but unmentioned by the narrator.

A lively read-aloud built around personified eyebrows, comic transformations and visual surprises. Its central movement is from rejecting a distinctive feature to recognising its value, while the eyebrows’ strange careers create opportunities for playful participation.

This is a participatory beach adventure rather than a detailed plot: children help Niko build, move through interactive elements and encounter a small anticipated setback while sharing the rhyming story.

Blip’s routine changes when a power cut disconnects her. Outside, she finds colour, play and companionship with a fawn, duck and rabbit, then faces the question of returning home and reconnecting.

A lively read-aloud about a lost dog’s imagined adventures, using rhyme, humour and expressive illustrations to explore survival, landscape, curiosity and the pull of home.

Choose this for a participatory story: children can help search for Patch, follow verbal prompts and enjoy rhyme, clues and playful pirate imagery. It combines an unfolding quest with a wind-down-to-bedtime framing.

A warm, funny story about feeling unready for school, combining Lola's determined excuses with Soren Lorensen's nervousness and imaginative collage illustrations.

This is a tender story about finding comfort amid displacement, then recognising another child's loneliness. Its emotional centre is Lubna's difficult decision about a treasured object.

A playful search story built around surprise: Louis’s failed-looking tricks become an entertaining show. Its visual humour, colourful illustrations and diverse audience create a warm, upbeat reading experience, with a final reveal involving the rabbit.

Expect a quick, joke-led read built around repetition, animal characters and toilet humour. The visual style is bold and simple, while the plot uses a wolf encounter and a comic reversal.

This is an active read-aloud: children can watch each animal, hear a movement prompt, and answer “I can do it!” before copying the action. The sequence introduces body parts and movement words through repetition and colourful collages.

A football mystery with international stakes, Off Side combines investigation and danger with questions about who controls clubs, opportunities and young players’ futures. Its strongest appeal is likely the meeting of sporting excitement and real-world fairness concerns.

A warm, comic sibling story about loving someone while also needing space. Nano and Felix’s disagreement grows through exclusion, bad weather and hurt feelings, then moves towards repair.

A gentle family story centred on Rosie’s imaginative wrapping game, moving through familiar objects, caring relatives, bedtime upset, and the arrival of a new baby sister.

A playful, highly visual expedition through fairyland shops, this book offers magical objects, comic character encounters and countless details to inspect. Its pleasure lies in browsing, spotting and imagining rather than following a strongly developed plot.

A gentle football story about Spot, Helen and their animal friends playing in two teams. It combines a simple match-day question with an emphasis on participation and enjoyment.

This is a sports-centred coming-of-age story about a transgender teenager balancing football, privacy, romance, family relationships, and the possibility of advocating for other trans young people.

A lively comic adventure for readers who enjoy K-pop, friendship drama and imaginative history. Its energy comes from mishaps, eccentric adults, a young pharaoh and repeated attempts to put time and history right.

A lively read-aloud built around rhythm, counting and visual searching. The repeated countdown creates a clear pattern, while colourful details and sound-words offer several ways for children to join in.

Expect a playful ghost hunt through an old house, where transparent pages reveal apparitions that the girl cannot see. Its main pleasure is shared spotting, prediction and uncertainty rather than a neatly explained haunting.

This looks like a lively friendship adventure built around contrasting personalities, imaginative inventions and a sudden encounter with a threatening figure. Its strongest appeal may be the trio’s teamwork and playful world-building.

A brisk, playful comic mystery built around a bomb-disposal mission. Its main pleasures appear to be wordplay, visual clues, gadgets and a narrator who may not be entirely trustworthy.

Expect a highly comic, unconventional story that turns homework, authority and strange family dynamics into absurd adventure. Its strongest appeal is likely its playful language and refusal to treat rigid learning schemes as unquestionable.

This is a fast-moving, highly visual comic novel about two boys inventing, writing and being repeatedly distracted in their extraordinary treehouse. Its humour comes from absurd machines, fantastical creatures, cartoon drawings and playful attention to making a book.

A compact, imaginative fantasy about a child’s anger and imaginative escape. Max’s journey towards and away from the Wild Things gives the book energetic movement, while his return home brings the story back to family.

Expect an exuberant, highly imaginative world built around joy, singing, visual comedy and surprising arrivals. Its appeal appears to lie more in playful characters and happenings than in a fully explained plot, though the available storyline is incomplete.

This is an immersive mystery built around clues, competing players and a virtual-reality setting. Its appeal lies in escalating secrets and atmosphere, while the substantial dialogue may make the opening feel slower.

This is an energetic, funny and sometimes unsettling portrait of childhood, told through Paddy’s immediate perspective. Its loose vignettes reward attention to changing relationships rather than expecting a conventional, steadily plotted story.

A tense, character-led coming-of-age story about four boys whose friendship is tested by status, risky choices and pressures around becoming men. Its alternating viewpoints give each boy an individual voice while keeping their shared situation central.

Expect lively, short-to-long poems designed for reading aloud, joining in and experimenting with rhythm, pace, volume and expression. The collection offers many entry points rather than one sustained plot.

This is a thoughtful story about a child carrying adult responsibilities who finds friendship, creativity and adventure while visiting Italy. An injured otter and the people Jakub meets help broaden his sense of who he is.

A cheerful school celebration becomes a lively water fight, with children, teachers, costumes, inflatables and a hose. The rhymes, repeated splashy sounds and colourful illustrations make the event feel energetic and playful.

Expect playful poems that invite laughter and imaginative thinking, balancing recognisable childhood moments with fanciful questions, surprising creatures and deliberately silly situations.

This is a performance-friendly poetry collection: playful sounds, repeated rhyme, comic images and short narratives offer opportunities to laugh, listen, join in and notice how words work.

A poetry collection to dip into rather than read as a continuous story: poems celebrate animals, stars, trees and the wider planet, combining playful invention with ecological seriousness and reflective moments.

A warm, imaginative picture book about how a child invests an ordinary stick with meaning. Its playful journey combines make-believe, kindness and a potentially affecting moment of letting go.

A lively bedtime adventure turns a stormy house into an imaginary ship. The story offers surreal play, colourful illustrations and a comic creature encounter, while ending with breakfast and family help.

This appears to offer a playful fantasy story centred on Emily Brown’s attachment to Stanley, her old grey rabbit. Its picture-book form and themes of rabbits, play and toys may invite shared reading, though the central conflict is only partly visible.

Expect a humorous, performance-friendly story in which cake, sounds and expressive illustrations create a playful appeal.

Choose this for shared, lively poetry reading: it combines performance, humour and imaginative wordplay with opportunities to experiment with poetic forms and invent poems together.