Billie B Brown 1-10 – Billie B Brown, Collection 1

Sally Rippin's Billie B Brown, Collection 1 gathers ten short stories for 5 year olds about a girl who has a lot of opinions and not much patience.

What happens

Every story starts the same way. Billie has fifteen freckles, six pairs of stripy socks and one banana sandwich. Do you know what the B in Billie B Brown is for?

And then the answer changes. Brave. Big. Best. Beautiful. Bossy. Bursting.

That little swap is cleverer than it looks. Your reader works out the pattern by story two and starts guessing the word before the page turns.

The stories themselves are small and very true. In the first one, Billie's best friend Jack gets asked to play football at lunchtime and Billie is told girls can't. She says football's boring. She doesn't mean it. She sits on the monkey bars with half a banana sandwich she doesn't want any more, and "the cross feeling and the sad feeling" muddle up her tummy.

Isn't that exactly it? The thing you say when you're hurt is almost never the thing you mean.

Elsewhere she goes camping with a torch and a packet of marshmallows, plays hairdressers with twelve sparkly hairclips, takes fourteen clipboards on a school trip to the zoo (she can be a teensy bit bossy), and can't sleep at somebody else's house when her mum and dad drive away.

The writing is as plain as it gets. Short sentences, one idea each, a lot of white space. A new reader can finish one story in a sitting and feel like they've read a whole book, which is the point of buying them ten at a time.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing these are Australian, so your reader will meet soccer rather than football, bathers rather than a swimming costume, grade rather than year and bandaids rather than plasters. None of it stops the story. It's just worth a heads-up if you're reading aloud and want to swap the words as you go.

Billie is also allowed to be genuinely annoying before she works something out, which is refreshing. Nobody is teaching her a lesson on the last page.

What to read next

If ten isn't enough, the second Billie B Brown collection carries straight on with the same pair. It opens with Billie and Jack hunting dinosaurs in the back garden, Billie bandaged from head to foot and thoroughly enjoying herself.