By Baptiste Paul
A soccer game on a Caribbean island, called together by one girl shouting until the whole village turns up, and played straight through a rainstorm.
"Vini! Come! The field is calling!" A girl and her little brother go door to door until half the island is coming: friends, cousins, the fruit vendor, everybody. First they have to shoo the cows off the grass. Then it's friends against friends, bare feet, one ball, no referee and no grown-up organizing anything. Halfway through, a tropical downpour opens up over them, and instead of running for cover they keep playing, sliding and filthy and laughing, until their mothers finally call them in to wash off the mud. Creole words from the author's home island of Saint Lucia run right through the text, and Jacqueline Alcántara's paintings are all motion, wet grass, and green.
Your child is already soccer-mad and can't read yet, and this is the one. There's almost no plot to hold in your head. There's a game, there's rain, there's mud, and that is exactly what a small soccer-obsessed child wants a book to be about. The Creole is the good kind of hard: unfamiliar words with a glossary at the back, close enough to sound out, and your child will feel clever for cracking them. And it says something a lot of sports books miss, that the best game of your life needs no uniforms, no coach, and no field except the one with the cows on it.