Confetti by Dean Atta and Alea Marley

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This is a delightful picture book that uses confetti as a way of expressing a child’s, Ari’s, encounter with the world, a world of joy and enchantment.

Central to this is the relationship between Ari and her Uncle, and the naming of him simply as “Uncle” had a echo of Dean Atta’s “naming” of people in Person Unlimited (The Doctor, the Redhead, Cuz etc).

This is clearly a book with an agenda, it is sad that showing people of colour and people in same-sex relationships in a book for children still counts as “having an agenda” but it does. That said this is such a playful and charming book that the “agenda” is held with the lightest of touches.