Ethel the Penguin

When your next-door neighbours are penguins, with a naughty daughter called Ethel, life at school and at home can be full of surprises. Ethel leaves her parents a note to say she has gone for a ride on the ferris wheel. Horrified, her mother and father jump into their bright blue car and dash through the streets, hoping to catch her before she is whisked high into the sky. But we then see father penguin, his feathers turning grey, before he faints clean away at the sight of Ethel so high in the sky. Mother penguin weeps an awful lot of water, as they plead with Ethel to come down. Meanwhile the wayward daughter is having a ball of a time, loving the height and declaring she will never come down. But the realisation that her parents really are full of great anxiety makes Ethel think again… and, eventually, down she comes, SPLAT. Ethel the penguin’s parents kissed her with a GURGLE. Perfectly NORMAL my mother says, for birds from the Antarctic Circle. The rhyming text is littered with upper case emphasis, and the illustrations are bold, filling every spread with the faces of the penguins and the next-door neighbours. The author was the 2020-2021 Australian Children’s Laureate and has many awards for children’s books to her name. This new title should be well loved.