Max the Champion

While this is a super picture book about a sports-mad boy with an overactive imagination, it is something considerably more.  Max loves sport, all kinds of sport, so much so that ‘night and day it fills his dreams’.  When he runs down the stairs for his breakfast, he is running a race in his mind; when he ‘dives’ into his cereal, his imagination has him diving into a swimming pool.  In everything he does, sport takes centre stage, and he is always the winner.  When his school has a sports day with another school, Max has the opportunity to shine, and shine he does.  As one reads through this story, one slowly becomes aware that some of the people we are meeting have special needs. Max’s best friend uses a wheelchair; Max himself wears glasses and a hearing aid and uses an asthma inhaler; two people on the street are using sign language; there is a man with a guide dog; a child in class has cherubism; another uses a leg brace; someone skis sitting in a chair; a girl has one eye blocked out on her glasses; the teacher wears what appears to be a deaf aid around her neck.  These details are so subtle, so beautifully presented that one might not even notice them.  And this is the beauty of it all.  These things are treated as natural, as part of ordinary life.  The children and adults are just being themselves, not set apart in any way, and this is how disability should be shown in children’s books and so rarely is.  Inclusivity should be just that, so usual as to be un-noticeable.  Children will pick up the signs almost by osmosis.  The two authors, working through Booktrust and NASEN, have long been proponents of inclusivity in children’s books, and in this story have produced the ideal.  The illustrations are bright and happy pictures of kids being kids and enjoying life to the full.  A special book.