It is perhaps a truism that you can always choose your friends – but not your family. Luckily most families, while they may have moments of trauma or difference, are on the whole the most important group in your life and relationships are happy or at least tolerant of idiosyncrasies. How do families fare when in the hands (or under the pen) of an author? If current young adult books are to be believed, dysfunction is the norm – or seems to be. However, there are other more positive depictions as Brian Sibley records in his homage to the Moomin family. Frank Cottrell Boyce however looks back with a certain pleasurable frisson to the many varied – and sometimes downright – strange families to be met in books for children. There is surely nothing cosy about the parents in the French tale ‘Ma mère m’a tué, Mon père m’a mangé’! Here is a real contrast to the comforting presence of Moominmamma for whom no addition to the family home is too much and who can always be relied on to rise to the occasion. Moominpappa is, of course, a rather different proposition. But that is what makes a family interesting and memorable because the reader can recognise elements from their own experience.

Or can they? Patrice Lawrence reminds us that for her growing up, this was far from the case. Though the unit – and perhaps the relationships, might have struck a chord, they did not portray her family since the only books she saw reflected an exclusively white British society. Where were the diverse families she knew through her lived experience? It has taken a long time for this to change and it is still a long way from a norm where all children will be able to find themselves and their families as well as others in the books they read. Patrice Lawrence, of course, is very much in the vanguard of this movement.