Best Books This Month – April 2026

Marinka, Benjamin and the House with Chicken Legs are back in a fabulous sequel to the original The House with Chicken Legs.

Marinka and her House have finally stopped wandering and settled down to live near her best friend, Benjamin. But all is not well with the House; it seems tired and distant. In an effort to help the house regain some of its sparkle, Marinka and Yaga Tatyana decide to host a guiding but it goes disastrously wrong, plummeting Marinka and Benjamin into a breathtaking adventure which makes Marinka question her past, her future and everything she thought she knew. Testing her friendships to the limit, can Marinka save her House? Can she get Benjamin safely back to his family? And will she finally find out who she really is?

I usually find that sequels are rarely as good as the original, but this is most definitely an exception. Fast-paced and as well-written as we have come to expect from Sophie Anderson, this is a welcome addition to any bookshelf and an exciting return of a much-loved story.

A classic in the making, this is an inspired book by father and son team Daniel and Finn Ojari (aged 8!). The pair came up with the idea when doodling together at the kitchen table, and noticing the remarkable similarities between objects – a plum and a hippos bum for example! The result is a laugh-out-loud funny, joyous reading experience for younger children, full of simple but gorgeous artwork. A cut out hole in a page reveals part of a drawing, making the reader think they see one thing, but….SURPRISE!….turn the page and the whole object is revealed to be something entirely different!

The call and response structure of the book encourages reader participation, and makes this a perfect read aloud for a group as well as for individual children learning to read independently, all of whom will be unable to resist the challenge of guessing what the hidden image could be in each scenario. Each call rhymes with its response, cleverly and subtly engaging children’s language skills along with their powers of observation.

It’s a brilliant book – an irresistible concept, funny and beautifully presented. This absolutely deserves a place on every nursery and reception bookshelf!

Gus the Goat wants to play and his friend Mavis Mole is happy to agree. There’s one problem – what shall they play? Whack-a-moley? Crack-a-moley? Quack-a-moley or Stack-a-moley? Unfortunately, all Gus’s outlandish ideas aren’t so much fun for Mavis. But then Mavis retaliates with her own outrageous ideas that aren’t so much fun for Gus. After a lot of false starts, they finally settle for something much calmer and their friendship is saved.

Vividly funny illustrations by Anders Frang bring the story to life visually. The expressions of the animals show perfectly their growing frustration with each other. They also illustrate the way everyone loves to watch an argument – throughout the book, two cheeky squirrels follow proceedings intently. The story is all about consideration for others and finding compromise but you will have oodles of fun along the way.

If you read it aloud more than once, encourage joining in with the silliest bits. There’s stacks of slapstick humour and lots of cheerful wordplay with rhymes and puns, making it a great choice for a rumbustious storytime.

A meticulously detailed and fun way to learn about cities across the world in this vibrant, playful information text. Almost a modern version of Where’s Wally or Richard Scarry, Tengiz takes a double page for each city; full page city illustrations presented in colourful building blocks with rivers and waterways weaving through.

The geographical layout is pretty much intact, for example Paris shows the Seine weaving through the page, with Notre Dame in the middle, and then the south bank with the Eiffel Tower, and the Sacre-Coeur all the way in the north. Tengiz populates the cities with a raft of weird and wonderful characters, some human, some animal-like.

The text reveals smatterings of foreign languages, as well as dotted information about food and drink, the city’s history, green spaces, famous landmarks, and incidental details, such as the numbers of stray cats in Rome. This lively and beautiful book will capture imaginations, provoke curiosity and provide hours of looking. Cities include Mexico City, Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Budapest, Seoul, Tokyo and Istanbul, New York, Rome, London and Amsterdam. The contents page shows where in the world the cities are. A fantastically intriguing book, its last page reminiscent of the Disney ride, It’s a Small World. Joyful!

This highly recommendable book would be a very worthwhile addition to the school library alongside Olivia Wakeford’s first novel, My Dog.  It could be used as a class read, too, in Year 5 or 6, if not considered too long.  There are links to history and mining, for schools where the curriculum covers these topics, and the links to Wales will make it particularly popular in Welsh schools.

The lives of quite a disparate group of characters intertwine with imagination and skill, focused around main character Evan, his family, school friends and dog. Evan’s Grandad has dementia (the word isn’t used, but ‘sundowning’ is and it’s clear he lives with this condition) and he does not like to talk about his memory of being a miner along with pit ponies who were put to work in the mines.

We begin to inhabit their world; the world of school museum visits and classroom bullies; of Welsh mining history, auras and ghostly apparitions; of grown-ups struggling to balance work and family; of arguments and reconciliations. There lives are sometimes disturbing, sometimes mundane, sometimes difficult and sometimes puzzling. This is fiction at its best; storytelling which deals sensitively with pertinent issues while still being enjoyable. The inclusion of a ghost pony introduces a magical element.

This is an engrossing read: eye-opening, heart-warming and memorable.