Willy the Whale

Uncle Amon's Willy the Whale is a set of five short, gentle stories for 6 year olds about a young humpback working out what his own body is for.

What happens

First Willy finds his fins. He waves the left one and moves right. He waves the right one and moves left. He tries to shake them off altogether.

Then he discovers his tail, which is worse, because the harder he looks at it the further away it gets.

That is the whole of the first story. A small whale getting cross with himself until the three bits finally agree to work together and he can dive, surface and chase fish.

It is a rather lovely thing to hand a 6 year old. Learning to drive your own arms and legs is a problem they have only just finished having.

Each of the five stories has a point to it. Staying near your grown ups. What counts as safe fun and what doesn't. Why the pod moves on. What to do when you feel angry.

The last one is the nicest. Willy wakes up happy about the journey ahead and finds that what comes out of him is a song. He has no idea what a song even is. Then his mum sings back, and hers is better.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Willy goes down and down trying to find the bottom of the ocean, and his mother catches him and tells him plainly that if he goes any further he will die.

It is one line and nothing happens to him. But it is much blunter than anything else here, so if your reader is the sort who lies awake on a sentence like that, save this one for the daytime.

Fair to say as well that not all of it is story. There is a page of jokes at the back (the whale one is very bad), a maze, and a few pages advertising the author's other books.

The sentences are short and repeat themselves in a helpful way. A child reading alone can finish a whole story in a sitting, which is a good feeling when you are six.

Don't come expecting belly laughs from the stories themselves. The warmth is in Willy being small, getting things wrong, and his mum being patient about it.

What to read next

Dear Professor Whale is the same kind of quiet. That one starts at the far end of a whale's life, with a retired professor drifting about in the blue, wishing somebody would call him something friendlier.