Elephant Island is a peculiar tale!  At the heart of the book is the theme of community. When Elephant’s ship capsizes, he has to resort to inventiveness to fix it. Children will love his quirky approach to problem-solving solving and wild engineering attempts, and the illustrations will be pored over as, with each look, there is something new to spot. Arnold the elephant has a very positive outlook on life and no matter what, he believes that he can fix things. His perseverance and determination result in a home for all where everyone is welcome.

Seemingly aimed at a younger audience but really well suited to the whole primary range, this picture book makes references to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner poem with the line “Alone, alone, all all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea!” The vocabulary used within the story is ambitious ‘salvage’, ‘seafaring’, ‘catastrophic’ and ‘expanding’ for example and so this will lend itself to discussion about the meaning of new words. For these reasons, it is a picture book that would be better placed in an older classroom or, if to be shared with younger children, to be read alongside an adult.

Readers will laugh at Arnold’s unusual approaches to fixing problems – his solutions are never the easy, obvious ones! The pictures contain things to find, things to count and each character is full of expression. This is a great book for sharing and for chatting about. Children will delight in Arnold’s creative contraptions and Leo Timmers’ detailed illustrations.