Zip's Apollo

Supermarket trolleys will never be the same again for readers of Zip’s Apollo. Zip is a boy under pressure. The son of environmental campaigners, he has lost his father on active service attempting to protect a forest, and having grown up in green wild places has been rehoused with his remaining family in a newly-built suburb with yet-to-be-named streets and plastic trees. His mother is in deep depression, his gran has suffered a stroke, his brother is a toddler, and only Zip and his great-aunt Ivy are left to fight off the ever-threatening Social Services. The only amenity is a new supermarket. And it is here that Zip brings to life the trolley Apollo, who becomes his trollepathic partner and guide in finding new friends and bringing new life to his own family and theirs. In turn Zip and his mates, the Friends of Apollo, bring life and liberty to all the supermarket’s trolleys in a golden climax at the winter solstice.

This is a fast-paced, funny, white-knuckle story, told with wit, inventive sound effects and cinematic energy. Changes of typeface and a few identifying speech-markers signify who is speaking in the rush of narrative shorthand. This is a book for the film-literate and computer-literate young, a bold experiment in children’s fiction. It is also unobtrusively serious, humane and wise. These are in-between children (of uncertain family role, race and gender) in an in-between place, in an in-between time after deaths and before rebirths. The book is about bereavement and recovery, ends and beginnings, accepting the past but daring to welcome the new. All this is symbolised by the winter solstice, when one year dies and another is born, and is finally saluted by the birth of a baby. Underneath a zany high-speed fantasy, the story explores important and healing themes. It is (in a deeper sense than the usual) a joy to read.