PERFECT (POP-UP) PUNCTUATION BOOK 6+
by Kate Petty
Bodley Head, £9.99; 12pp

THE INCREDIBLE BOOK EATING BOY 6+
by Oliver Jeffers
Harper Collins, £10.99; 32pp

AS THAT BACK TO school feeling dawns, the prospect of celebrating grammar in children’s books seems particularly unappealing.

Many children, my own included, hate English lessons because of the emphasis on grammar in the national curriculum. Where grammar was once absorbed by simply reading what you enjoyed, and left to Latin lessons to anatomise, it is now the subject that teachers must Gradgrind their way through, destroying enthusiasm and a love of books.

Correct punctuation has recently become the latest bugbear, thanks in no small measure to Lynne Truss’s bestselling Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Enraged by “greengrocers’ English”, and its misplaced apostrophes, she wrote a witty and timely polemic with examples of how punctuation changes the emphasis and sense of sentences. As an aid to bowel movements after a large Christmas dinner it was invaluable. A children’s version, subtitled Why Commas Really Do Make a Difference, seeks to repeat this for those out of nappies.

“Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, or stop,” Truss writes. The amusing cartoons proceed by showing the kind of situations that children can identify with, and perceive to be different — as in “Slow, children crossing” or “Slow children crossing”.

What is perhaps unintentional is that in each case where the punctuation is misplaced, the situation looks considerably more amusing. (“After we left, Grandma, Mummy and I skipped about in the park” shows an old lady dancing about with her Zimmer frame; “Becky walked on her head, a little higher than usual” has a little girl doing headstands on top of a mountain).

The reason why grammar bores children rigid is that it runs counter to all their subversive instincts. Bonnie Timmons, the illustrator, grasps this but Truss, it seems, does not. My generation grew up feeling that, thanks to Star Trek, splitting infinitives to boldly go was much more exciting than to go boldly. I can’t help feeling that our children will feel the same way about correct punctuation.

A pop-up book about punctuation by Kate Petty and Jennie Maizels is much more fun. Fiddling with clever tabs and flaps is irresistible, and these show you how to break a sentence with a semicolon, break them with a dash or let them trail away in an ellipsis.

Vowels slide away to be replaced by apostrophes, diggers pick up parentheses and helpful elephants show how to use full stops and capital letters.

My favourite page had commas wiggling like tadpoles (though one immediately did a nose-dive and disappeared). My 11-year-old son, who recently raced through His Dark Materials but who still has difficulties with punctuation, thought it “cool”, but I suspect it appeals more as a toy than a learning aid.

Oliver Jeffers, whose How to Catch a Star, and Lost and Found were both huge hits last year, has produced another offbeat picture book in The Incredible Book Eating Boy.

I love his work, and this is his best yet, with bright stylish drawings reminiscent of Sempé’s cartoons helping to tell the story. Henry is a boy who eats books (the cover has a tooth-marked chunk bitten out of it), tearing out pages, devouring volumes and, weirdly, getting smarter with each one according to the diagram showing how information passes from his stomach to his brain. Before long he’s even smarter than his teacher.

However, all those books too quickly make him ill, mixed-up and forgetful — until he discovers reading. Although the idea is similar to Ian Beck’s recent book, Winston the Book Wolf, this has its own zany charm. It’s wittier and probably more helpful than books about grammar, though the best thing of all for a child about to stop trailing clouds of glory and enter the prison-house of school is to read a book of fairytales.

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