Iggy Pig at the Seaside; Iggy Pig's Dark Night

Iggy Pig in this new series of beginner readers for 5-8 year olds, is an appealing character, bright as a button and so intent on enjoying life that he does not stop to think about the intentions of the ‘big grey animal’ that keeps bouncing up to play with him. It is an old joke but one that parents and children might still enjoy, particularly if text and illustrations always worked as well together as they do in the opening to Iggy Pig at the Seaside , where Mother Pig gets sick and the wolf exhausted on their way to the beach. Unfortunately, neither French’s stories or Melling’s illustrations live up to their promise. Iggy Pig at the Seaside runs out of ideas as soon as it gets there: and Iggy Pig’s Dark Night introduces a whole farmyard of coy alliterative characters – Chicky Chick, Lucky Lamb and Dusty Dog – with a chorus of Baas, Meeows and Woof Woofs, that took me back to my own childhood school readers. Books like this, with a controlled vocabulary and frequent repetition of words, are difficult to do well, and more trouble should have been taken. Each title invites you to flip the pages to see one of the characters running through the book: in Iggy Pig’s Dark Night you are promised ‘a hungry wolf’ but actually it is dear old ‘Dusty Dog’.