More Jessame Stories

To call a children's book delightful risks damming it with clich?d praise, but this book really is delightful in a literal sense. Jessame is a young Afro-Caribbean girl who lives with her mother and grandparents in a flat in Bethnal Green. The stories recount a set of fairly mundane urban adventures: a picnic in Greenwich Park, an attempt to bring a reserved refugee out of her shell, a family wedding, an accident at a swimming pool. But Jarman's writing conveys a vivid sense of life freshly experienced; she has an acute ear for the felicities of children's speech, and for the way in which a young imagination can transform a walk to the shops into a phantasmagoria of imaginings. The book is both tender and celebratory of the splendid diversity of everyday life and people, and expresses a warm hearted appreciation of London, particularly the bits that are seldom commemorated in literature.