Page's Pages. Book Reviews by Eric Page

Sarah Savage (author), Joules Garcia (illus) She's My Dad! (www.wordery.com, £12.19, published by Jessica Kingsley).

Local author Sarah Savage has produced a brightly illustrated book for children aged 3–7 which engages in an effective and gentle way in an early years setting of family diversity.

Presented with fun, key messages about friends, cuddles, kittens, family and respect, this is a great book to support children whose parents may have transitioned, or are starting off on a journey towards their authentic selves. It’s an intergenerational book, with people presented as varied, diverse and accepting.

Most importantly it’s also a book about what doesn’t change when a parent transitions, it’s about unconditional love, about family bonds, strong respectful relationships and how families, and children in particular can be resilient, adaptive and creative in their new ways of relating.

With a helpful reading guide, sharing vocabulary and explanations around pronoun use and respect, Savage’s book is a clarion call of simplicity and care in how a family is still a family even though the gendered term of the parents may change.

Illustrated throughout by Joules Garcia, with their bold, warm and colourful graphics, this is a balanced and fun addition to the growing library of books addressing diverse families and the issues they present to healthy learning, acceptance and growing up.

Catherine Cusset Life of David Hockney: A Novel (www. arcadiabooks.co.uk, £9.99, published by Arcadia Books).

This is a rather adoring depiction of the life of the gay British painter whose work, life and debonair blaseness is the very model of California dreaming.

Cusset takes us from the early days of Hockney’s life, through his change and development, his early struggles and awakenings, growing up poor, leaving a repressive England, the electric thrills of New York, Aids, creative upheavals, ending up alongside the pools of California.

Cusset dives into the enveloping oddness of Hockney’s deep love affair with Peter Schlesinger, the ‘love of his life’, and we are given an intimate viewpoint of their passion and agony. The narrator gives us intimate, sometimes sad, but always ardent perspective on their relationship, the ending tinged with melancholy. The prose here is delicate, precise, but brutal, it has Northern bluntness to it, which focuses on the emotional content without dressing up the rawness of the emotional.

It feels like a Netflix script, scene after photographic scene artfully described and the action taking place when the background has been readied but this doesn’t distract from the book’s charm, although there are a few factual errors in this bio-fiction. Like his paintings, this book aims to capture the quiet suburban heart of Hockney’s life, set against where he placed himself to be the ‘Artist’, essentially Northern British, but encased in shiny plastic LA.

Held up to that light he so famously loves and this engaging work of fiction allows it to fall in a flattering way, but also gives insight into the deep shadows that spring from its shimmering glare.

Cusset's book is a homage to an artist adored, with the fiction and fact blended together, like canvas and paint to give an overwhelming sensation of complete narrative, capturing an element of movement which unfolds into a wider understanding of this charming man and his charmed life.

Amie Taylor (author), Liza Stevens (illus) The BIG Book of LGBTQ+ Activities (www.wordery. com, £16.99, published by Jessica Kingsley).

Well researched and offering representation to rainbow families and to children that may grow up to be LGBTQ+ themselves, this book is fabulously inclusive, but with a small ‘i’ , its focus working, playing and learning via set activities.

There’s plenty of fun, wit and age appropriate humour here, the stories look to our own LGBTQ+ communities for protagonists, priorities and reflection, aimed at the 6-9 age range.

The book has a series of tales with characters that have an LGBTQ+ identity, all illustrated by Liza Stevens who has an effervesce bounce to their artwork, which children love to copy. Each story is then followed by quizzes, worksheets, word-searches, drama activities, colouring and writing activities and some more indepth explanation about LGBTQ+ identities. At the back of the book is an easy guide for parents or teachers about how to address questions asked by children, offering support to educators and unpicking some harmful narratives which are often shared by wider non-LGBTQ+ media.

With LGBTQ+ life now being taught as part of RSE in schools, this book is one of the first seriously inclusive activity books which excels in celebrating diversity in all its forms and reflecting the real intersectionality of the UK’s families many of our young people come from.

Greg Mania Born to Be Public: A Memoir (www.brownsbfs. co.uk, £18.59, published by Clash Books).

In this wonderfully warm and funny memoir, that’s searing and honest, Mania - pronounced mahn-ya except when out and about in Lower East Side New York drag circles – takes the energetic banality and excitement of his life – the child of Polish immigrants and a ‘pariah prodigy’ – and hammers it into a wonderful selfmade suit of gilded ClubKid queer armour.

The author of internet hit Le Cabaret De Mania knows how to package it and then serve it up, category is: Living a Double Life, Fiercely. Taking us through his hook ups, sexual adventures, skirmishes with mental health and tender rejections of romance, this is a laugh out loud coming out story and his searching for reality and authenticity in a world which seems to be obsessed with image. Mania takes his life and offers it up, feathers and all for us to giggle over, connecting just enough to keep it warm but going right out there on occasional with some reflective honesty to reminds us that he’s a real hurting human being and then holding our hand, walking us back out into the sparkling lights he loves so much and allowing us to revel in the absurdities of modern metropolitan super diverse American queer lives.