Giraffe Island

Giraffe Island

Sofia Chanfreau

Amanda Chanfreau

Gecko Press. 2024

224pp., pbk., RRP $A17.99

9781776575657

Far away in the middle of the sea there is an island shaped like a giraffe. Nine-year-old Vega lives there with her father and Grandad Hector—a gardener and former ringmaster.  Their shed—the Paraphenalium—is filled with every possible thing you didn’t know you needed.

Although her dad is attentive, he always seems distracted and cannot see the extraordinary animals that inhabit Vega’s life and keep her company. Her bathroom is home to a grey bear with shampoo-lathered fur, and every day she talks with the asphalt beaver and crosswalk zebra on the way to school. However, Grandad Hector can see them and he even has some weird and wonderful creatures of his own that live in his garden which is a magical place.

Vega has never met her mother and when she asks  about her, both her father and grandfather answer her in riddles so she really has no idea what has happened to her, although she longs to know. But she is worried about the changes that she is seeing in her dad as he becomes more distant and forgetful. When he introduces a woman called Viola to her, things start to get colder in the flat. There is a coating of ice everywhere, snow starts to fall and all the food that Dad prepares is cold. When Dad’s heart becomes coated in ice Vega decides to run away and find help. Along with her new BFF Nelson and Hector, transported by the magnificent Muffinmobile, (an invention of her grandfather), they go off to the mainland to seek Vega’s mother. They are convinced that she is living in the travelling circus and will be able to melt Dad’s heart and return life to normal. Using clues from Hector’s garden and a penpal’s letters from a school project, they set out to find answers and find not only a unique circus but also some unexpected answers. 

For independent readers who enjoy  ‘magical realist mystery adventures” , this won the 2022 Finlandia Junior Prize awarded by the Finnish Book Foundation for books in either Swedish or Finnish to “celebrate reading and highlight new Finnish first-rate literature” as well as being nominated for the Nordic Council Children and Young People’s Literature Prize.  Detailed illustrations boost the reader’s imagination, and for all that it has the fantasy elements, it is deeply rooted in the need to belong to a family that we all have.