Emily Brown and the Elephant Emergency

How lovely to have Emily Brown and Stanley back, this time joined by an elephant called Matilda. But Matilda has an over-anxious mum, and each time the three friends become immersed in an exciting, imaginative adventure, the emergency telephone rings. It is Matilda’s mum anxious that Matilda isn’t wearing her wellies or that she might get bitten by a dinosaur or some other dire prediction of imminent catastrophe.  One day mummy doesn’t ring and Matilda, now anxious herself, imagines that her mother has forgotten her. Emily and Stanley discover that mum has been ‘kidnapped’ by a ‘great grey busy-ness’, a metaphor for work that keeps her far too busy and hence worried about every little thing. After a dramatic rescue, the three friends, accompanied now by Matilda’s mummy, go off again on their adventures, leaving anxiety behind. This zany story is full of fun as well as being an imaginative exploration of insecure emotional attachment. Layton’s matchless illustrations with huge red telephones in unlikely places and anarchic details (a set of taps on a stone producing a river for white water rafting, for instance) are perfect foils for the story. Quite superb.