Saturday Is Pancake Day (Bernadette Green, illus Daniel Gray-Barnett, Scribble)

In the lively domestic chaos of Saturday Is Pancake Day—a story that might make you relieved it’s not your turn for the washing up (or that you’re not attending the dinner party concluding the book)—Bernadette Green and Daniel Gray-Barnett merge the vibrancy of their individual works (including Who’s Your Real Mum? and Katerina Cruickshanks) in their inaugural collaboration. When Dada Henry doesn’t want to get out of bed on Saturday for Papa Milo’s famous pancakes, Milo, the children, and Gwendolyn (the irrepressible cockatoo) concoct a parade of ever-more-ridiculous recipes to tempt poor Henry, who has woken feeling ‘like a rain cloud’. Children aged 4–8 will delight in the gross-out humour of meals such as Good Morning Green Ice Cream (pickles, spinach, mayonnaise and ice cream), and they’ll become caught up in the fox family’s warm-hearted culinary bedlam, represented ably in Gray-Barnett’s detailed, whirlwind, peekaboo-style tableaux of their treehouse home. Green and Gray-Barnett extend their passion for inclusive representation by addressing mental health through the gentle portrayal of Henry’s struggle, as well as seamlessly incorporating same-sex parents into the story as a natural element, without unnecessary emphasis. Saturday Is Pancake Day is a fun, bouncy book that’s definitely too energetic for bedtime stories!

Books+Publishing reviewer: Anica Boulanger-Mashberg is a freelance editor and writer, and a bookseller at the Hobart Bookshop. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Friday Unlocked reviews Reviews