You can tell that a child likes a book when they insist on sleeping with it by their bed at night, open at the page of their favourite illustration. Just so they can look at it as soon as they wake up the next morning. That’s exactly what Little Miss C was like with Fiddlesticks!
Mouse loves his little house and is incredibly house proud about it. One day he noticed that one of his windows was a little crooked though. Oh Fiddlesticks! he exclaimed. Unable to fix the problem himself he enlisted his friend bear to help. Bear tried to straighten up the windows, but ended up pulling it clean off the wall!
A pattern soon appears with all Mouse’s friends trying to help, but actually making matters worse. Poor Mouse. The little house he loved so much had been ruined by his friends and Mouse is left speechless.
As the sun goes down Mouse realises that he need to go home and try to sort out his little house. But, as he arrives home he realises that his friends may have been responsible for ruining the house that he loved, but they have also been responsible for building him a new house. An amazing new house. Exactly as good friends would.
When Mouse’s new house is revealed there’s a lovely fold out double page picture of the new house and this has by far been LMC’s favourite part of the whole book. So much so that she’s opened it out so often that we’ve already had to apply sellotape to the fold! The house has so many little details that she’s been completely mesmerised by the picture and the first time she read the book she lay in bed that night staring at it for hours. The next morning she was full of plans for how she was going to live in a house like Mouse’s one day.
The story itself is incredibly sweet and lovely to help young children realise that sometimes friends might do something which goes wrong and upsets them, but this doesn’t mean that they’re not their friend any more. Real friends also try and do nice things for each other when one of them is upset. Important messages for little ones to take on board.
There’s absolutely no doubt how much in love LMC is with Fiddlesticks! and if she carries on talking about new house plans then I think she may end up with a future career as an architect.
Disclaimer: We were sent a copy of Fiddlesticks! for the purposes of this review. This post contains affiliate links.
Leave a Reply