What Are You Looking For?

This is a gentle family story built from sensory seaside memories and a repeated pebble ritual. Its emotional centre is the child’s continuing connection with Grandad after his circumstances change.

Expect affectionate family humour: a child’s perspective celebrates a dad’s jokes, songs and familiar habits, with animal characters helping express why their dads feel special.

A bright, direct introduction to adoption and family belonging, using repeated language and diverse family images. Its emotional centre is welcome, but its one-sided account of need may not fit every family’s experience.

A warm, unusual story about an orphan girl and a gorilla forming a family, while facing official scrutiny and prejudice. Its humour and tenderness sit alongside uncertainty about belonging and justice.

Its emotional centre is the search for a new meaning of home.

This is a gentle shared-reading book about families expressing love through ordinary care. Its main offering is visible family variety alongside repeated, concrete examples of affection, help and time spent together.

This is a brisk family comedy about a photography project, a camping trip and repeated practical mishaps. Its broader interest lies in questioning polished online images while showing family connection emerging through an untidy shared experience.

What Type Of Family Are We? is presented as a short book about modern families, told through a child’s eyes. Its central invitation appears to be noticing that families can take different forms.

A warm, question-led story about how Barley Bear and his adoptive mother became a family. It introduces adoption-related ideas through cuddling, conversation and illustrations, rather than presenting a detailed account of every adoption experience.

This offers a gentle, imaginative way into questions about origins, adoption, belonging and family. Its woodland journey, animal encounters and illustrated fairytale atmosphere may invite close shared reading.

A gentle family story centred on two male penguins who care for an egg and raise Tango. Its main emphasis is belonging, parenting and adoption, with wider questions about what makes a family.

A gentle adoption story centred on Mia’s questions about family resemblance and her mixed feelings. It can open discussion of belonging without requiring every part of a child’s own experience to match Mia’s.

This is a warm, repetitive story about noticing differences in appearance while recognising shared ways of living, feeling and connecting. Its central reassurance is that families can belong together without looking alike.

A gentle adoption story that acknowledges frightening beginnings, uncertainty about change and lingering sadness or anger, while offering comfort through foster carers, social-worker support and a loving adoptive family.

This is a warm, repetitive read about a child making sense of her family story. It offers an adoption narrative framed through loving recollection, with comic visual details alongside tender family moments.

Read this as a warm, symbolic conversation between an adult and child about making a life together. Concrete building, imaginative journeys and emotional “tools” sit alongside ideas of protection, hope and forgiveness.

A quiet, participatory family story in which closeness is conveyed through shared routines rather than explanation. The sparse text and cropped illustrations invite a child and adult to notice details and create spoken stories together.

This is a gentle family story built around an everyday journey. Each relative brings a different pace, route and kind of companionship, while Papa’s shoulder ride becomes the child’s especially cherished school-day experience.

This is a warm celebration of cousins as friends and family, including relationships maintained across countries. It offers a bright, inclusive shared-reading experience centred on connection.

This is a celebratory rhyming picture book about dads’ different skills, interests and ways of showing care, including playfulness, tenderness and resilience.

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.

This is a humorous, emotionally serious story about a guarded young person whose magic, friendship and care for her grandmother bring questions about love, loss and opening up.

A warm picture-book story about welcoming a mysterious, vulnerable stranger, forming attachment, experiencing sudden separation and extending hospitality to others like him. Its imaginative setting leaves room to discuss belonging without explaining everything about Mister Toots.