2020 – the year of the pandemic picturebook…

While We Can’t Hug started from a joke – a pandemic sequel to The Hug would have to be The Wave, no? – but the joke soon sobered up: Eoin and Polly turned it around within weeks, and Faber within a couple of months, in plenty of time to find its way into classrooms all over the country for the anxious return to school in September.

Michelle’s The World Made a Rainbow came along just a little later – Bloomsbury gave her very touching story of a family coming to terms with lockdown to newcomer Emily Hamilton, who found just the right images to match its emotion and its beauty, and to help it speak to children around the world. These two books sold over a hundred thousand copies in at least ten languages between them, by the end of the year.

Everything else came out in spite of the pandemic: either launching in the couple of months before the coronavirus arrived, or right in the teeth of the first lockdown when bookshops were shut and everyone was buying canned goods and loo roll, or once the pandemic had set in and readers had settled down and started buying books again. It was a tricky year to launch new authors or new series, but a decent one, all in all, for more established names.

Actually, one more book that swam with the tide of 2020, albeit inadvertently: Dawn Casey’s beautiful My Nana’s Garden. For anyone who has had to help a small person begin to come to terms with the loss of a grandparent, this musing on the cycles of nature does so more wisely and more movingly than any picturebook I’ve read.

And frankly, that’s quite enough looking back at 2020 – best click on 2021 for what’s to come, instead!