Age 3-7

Saul Steinberg’s famous cover for The New Yorker showing the mental map in which Ninth Avenue is huge and the rest of the world is distant and faint is surely one of the influences on Sara Fanelli’s vibrant, ingenious picturebook. This book maps, for instance, “My Day”, “My Heart” and “My Tummy” with a Steinbergesque sense of relative proportion. It is also influenced by children’s drawings — and likely to inspire them. Using bright, flat colours and concentric circles à la Robert Delaunay, scribbles, tiny figures, lettering in irregular capitals, perspectives from both above and the side and incomplete layers of childlike colouring-in, this is a stylishly designed object. The dust jacket unfolds to make a poster with spaces to fill in, and invites you to make your own map on the back — an irresistible proposition. This is certainly a book to look at and talk about before making your own versions of its maps. And, incidentally, it teaches children about basic counting, family relationships, colours and colour mixes, the meaning of traffic lights, the points of the compass and the language of a dog’s tail.

(Walker £10.99)

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