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Tove Jansson's Finn Family Moomintroll is a magical adventure for 6 year olds about a black top hat that changes whatever you leave inside it.
It's the second Moomin book. Spring has come to the Valley of the Moomins, and Moomintroll wakes up after sleeping for a hundred days and a hundred nights. Snufkin's bed is already empty.
Up on a mountain top, Moomintroll, Snufkin and Sniff find a tall black hat. They carry it home for Moominpappa. It's a bit too big for him, so it ends up in a corner as a waste-paper basket.
That's where the trouble starts. Anything left in the Hobgoblin's Hat turns into something else. An eggshell becomes five little clouds you can ride (hup-si-daisy!). And when Moomintroll hides under the hat in a game of hide-and-seek, he comes out so changed that none of his friends know who he is.
That's the bit to read together. His friends decide he's a stranger and pile on top of him. Then Moominmamma looks into his frightened eyes for a long time and knows him straight away. You'll probably both want a cuddle after that one.
Moominhouse is full of friends who just turned up one day and stayed. There's the Snork Maiden, her brother the Snork and the Hemulen, who is miserable because his stamp collection is finished. There's the Muskrat, who won't get up. Moominmamma just adds another bed and gets on with making rissoles. Nobody is ever bored.
The storyteller pops in with little asides of their own, which children love. Did you know that if the first butterfly of spring is yellow, you'll have a happy summer? (This one is gold, which is even better.)
It's gentle and funny and a bit strange, in the nicest way. Some of the words are old-fashioned, so it's a lovely one to share at bedtime before your reader tackles it alone.
It isn't all sunshine. The friends catch a grumpy Ant-lion in a jar to test the hat on him, which is a bit of a mean trick. But it's all very Moomin, and nobody gets truly hurt.
If they love the valley and the river, try The Wind in the Willows next. It also starts on a spring morning, with Mole fed up of spring-cleaning, a river he has never seen before and a Water Rat with a little blue boat.
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