The Underwater Fancy-Dress Parade

By Davina Bell and Allison Colpoys, Scribe Publications, 2015.

Sometimes it’s hard to be brave. Sometimes you get that feeling. Sometimes you’re just not ready… until, one day, you are.

What do you do when you don’t want to do something?

On the first page, we meet Alfie. Alfie looks sad and down, and his head and shoulders are slumped. His toy rabbit is slumped on the shelf. Even his sweater hangs mournfully from the chest of drawers. Alfie’s got that feeling. He knows that feeling, that familiar feeling, that not nice feeling. He’s even had bad dreams about feeling trapped and carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders again. Too shy for friends, Alfie confides in the cowboys on his wallpaper.

To help Alfie become brave about going to an oceanic fancy-dress party, his mother takes him on a special day out to the aquarium. There Alfie meets a little clownfish. Perhaps because the clownfish was hiding when Alfie spotted him, it reminded him of how he feels sometimes. His mum explains to him that sometimes fish just hide away too. I think this makes it ok for Alfie to feel this way too.

The ending isn’t wrapped up into a tidy little bow, because we never know whether Alfie overcomes his fears or not, but we do that’s what he dreams about.

The illustrations in The Underwater Fancy-dress Parade remind me of books my father had as a boy, with a minimal colour palette and simplistic approach. They are sweet and could almost be straight out of the 50s.

Shy and anxious? Be brave, you can do it.

Awards

Winner: Australian Book Design Association Awards, Best Designed Children’s Illustrated Book, 2016.

Winner: Australian Book Designers Association, Designers’ Choice Children’s/YA Cover of the Year, 2016.

Winner: Australian Book Industry Awards, Small Publishers’ Children’s Book of the Year, 2016.

Winner: Children’s Book Council of Australia, The Crichton Award For Children’s Book Illustration, 2016.