Leeva at Last

Nobody’s parents are perfect, but Leeva’s are the worst. Even worse than those you might have met in Roald Dahl’s story of that long-suffering girl, Matilda. Leeva has to do all the household chores and has never been to school. In fact, she is not allowed to go beyond the garden hedge. Meanwhile, her self-obsessed mother is the town’s mayor and her penny-pinching father is its chief finance officer. So the citizens of Nutsmore suffer almost as much as Leeva does from their vanity and meanness. However, things are going to change. Just look at Leeva pictured on the cover of this book, smiling, determined, with a flowing green cloak that marks her as an ecological superhero; and, yes, she is outside her front door. This is the story of Leeva going out in the world, making friends, and transforming her town. Along the way, she adopts a homeless badger, is befriended by a librarian and her nephew, and lives for a while in the library’s returned books box. She makes her own friends too. There’s Osmund, who wears a hazmat suit and worries about all the risks there are in everyday life, and shy Fern, whose quietness belies her considerable talents. This is a charming and funny book, well supported by Matthew Cordell’s illustrations. It offers reassurance and encouragement to children who may feel anxious, or perhaps unworthy or unloved (and who doesn’t at one time or another?), that there is much to enjoy in the world and much for them to contribute too. Leeva’s obnoxious parents are not the only reference to Dahl in the book, Fern’s family has some resemblance to Charlie’s, and an elevator has as significant a part to play in the library as it does in Charlie’s second book. More important, while Sara Pennypacker, like Dahl, is an author firmly on the side of the child, she does not need to be as gruesome, cruel or spiteful as he sometimes is, to make her point or make us laugh.