Spring Story

It is Wilfred Toadflax's birthday. What happens is a picnic at Bluebell Bank and a surprise, and that is the plot — Jill Barklem plainly means it to be. Brambly Hedge is a community of mice living in the English countryside, and this book, one of the four seasonal volumes that started the series in 1980, gives its pages to a day rather than to a problem.

The originals were published as miniature books, and the watercolours are worked at a density that repays holding them close. Barklem did the research before the drawing: on her train journeys to art school she worked out English customs, plants and country detail, and the food, the clothes and the domestic arrangements in the pictures come from that rather than from invention. Anyone reading only the sentences aloud is handing over a large part of what is here.

It lands for a child small enough to be read to, and for an adult who likes a fully worked-out miniature world — the sort of book that gets kept and handed on rather than outgrown. The reservation is that the stakes are a birthday going well, and a child who wants something in a story to go wrong will find this one very quiet indeed.