Don't Want to Go!

Today’s generation of adults grew up on Shirley Hughes’s timeless stories such as Up and Up! and Dogger. Pre-school children will relate to this new story for precisely the same reasons as the earlier works. The underlying reasons for this are the simplicity of the text and the domestic details of the story, coupled with the distilled essence of each personality that is captured in the illustrations. Mum is ill and Dad must go to work so Lily has to go to Melanie’s house for the day. Of course, she says ‘Don’t want to go’ but it eventually turns out to be such fun that when it’s home time she again says: ‘Don’t want to go.’ What will guarantee the longevity of this book is the fact that it could be set in any period from the 1960s through to the foreseeable future. The only nod to modern technology is the mobile phone that Dad uses to call the babysitter. For Hughes to produce yet another classic book is unquestionably a remarkable achievement for someone who first illustrated a children’s book in 1953.