I Wish I’d Written: Alex T Smith

Alex T Smith on the series that is bursting with energy, honkingly funny and, at seventy years old, still modern and fresh.

Without question the book I wish I’d written (and illustrated) is Eloise by Kay Thompson and illustrated by Hilary Knight.

Eloise is a giddy, precocious six year old who lives on the ‘tippy-top floor’ of the Plaza Hotel in New York with her long suffering Nanny, and her pug, Weenie and her tortoise, Skipperdee.

I discovered the books when I was about seventeen and fell immediately in love with the entire package – the story (such as there is one), the pictures, and their relationship to each other.
From the second you open the cover you are swept along by Eloise as she tells you in her own hilariously inimitable way about her life living pretty much unmanaged in a luxury hotel in the 1950s.
The text is breathless and exciting with no full stops. It skitters here and there all over the page as Eloise goes about her day causing trouble on purpose, getting involved in things she has no business getting involved in, and generally larking about. Eloise doesn’t run, she ‘skibbles’. She doesn’t skulk about, she ‘slathes’.

The pictures are equally wonderful. Knight balances high glamour and close detail with beautifully observed images of a six-year-old being a six-year-old in all their marvellous, messy, jam-down-their-front realness. The text and the images bounce off each other in such a way that I can’t think of another example of it working quite so brilliantly. The result of which is something bursting with energy, honkingly funny and, considering the books are nearly seventy years old, incredibly modern and fresh.

Eloise by Kay Thompson, illustrated by Hilary Knight, is published by Simon and Schuster, 978-0743489768, £7.99 pbk.

Alex T Smith’s new book, Astrid and the Space Cadets: Attack of the Snailiens!, is out now, published by Macmillan Children’s Books, 978-1035019748, £7.99 pbk.