Mr McGee and his Hat

Mr McGee and his Hat

Pamela Allen

Puffin, 2024

32pp., hbk., RRP $A24.99

9781761345050

Morning, and it’s time to get out of bed and get dressed.  So Mr McGee did just that- pulled on his trousers. his socks and his shoes, and lastly, his hat.  But suddenly, along came the strongest gust of wind and blew Mr McGee, his hat and his cat, even his bed and table and chairs high in the sky!  And while they landed safely when the wind stopped, Mr McGee couldn’t find his hat.  Where could it be?

It’s over 35 years since we first met Mr McGee who lives under a tree, and 25 years since his adventure with the biting flea that exposed his genitals and sent teachers, teacher librarians and parents racing for the whiteout so such “disgraceful” images had no place in a picture book for our youngest readers. 

But rather than corrupting young minds, it showed a generation of young readers that stories could be fun and energetic and real, and sent them looking for more books by this prodigious author who has been entertaining us for decades with more than 50 books, eight of them with Mr McGee as the key character.  Now in her 90s, Kiwi Pamela Allen says that she wrote this latest adventure to to escape the ‘prison of death’ following the passing of her husband last year, aged 100.“I had to re-establish my mental health among the living … And the way in which I could do that was to write a book. And I consciously put myself as a first priority, after his death, to re-establish my sense of worth. Because you lose all contact with the living drive that exists. But if death is forever a prison, you’ve got to climb out of it. So that’s why Mr McGee was a natural resource for me.”

And she hasn’t lost any of her touch since she first explained Archimedes principle in her first book in 1980, and still in print. With its rhyming text, and iconic illustrative style, little ones will delight in helping Mr McGee look for his hat while those who know will delight in telling him where to look because they know.  And while our youngest readers will delight in listening to the rhythm and the rhyme, their parents will be happily revisiting their own reading childhood, perhaps even seeking out some of Mr McGee’s earlier adventures to share.  

Through her stories with their sheer fun embedded in the plot, the words and the pictures, Pamela is up there with Mem Fox and Joy Cowley in contributing so much to the development of literacy and reading skills over the generations  She is one whose works I have used time and again over the decades of working with little ones both in New Zealand and Australia  and to revitalise her works and introduce them to a new generation of budding readers through the review of a new story is such a privilege.  

Discover and share all Mr McGee;s adventures…