Someone stopped me at a school book fair last spring with a picture book in each hand and asked which one his granddaughter would like more. She was two. He had already checked the age band on the back, flipped both books over like a man reading cereal packets, and he was still stuck. I knew the feeling. The number on the back tells you a publisher thinks a child that age can physically manage the book. It tells you nothing about whether she'll demand it eleven nights running, or whether he'll still be enjoying it by the eighth.
After a few years of writing for this age group, and a good deal longer than that of reading to children in it, I've landed on five questions that actually help. None of them take more than a minute in the shop. Several work just as well on the "look inside" pages online, which is handy when the book fair has gone home.
One: does it give you anything to talk about?
The books small children love most are rarely the ones with the neatest plots. They're the ones that keep interrupting themselves. A duck wanders across a page wearing a hat, unexplained. A bear is carrying a tiny umbrella in bright sunshine. A child points, you make something up together, and the story you invented becomes more yours than the printed one.
When I was writing Who Sneezed Glitter, the sneeze itself was never the bit I worked hardest on. It was the page afterwards, where Poppy has glitter in her ears and up her nose and absolutely no intention of admitting it. That page exists because it's the one where grown-ups find themselves saying, "well, what would YOU have done?" Every time I hear a child answer that question, I count the book as working.
So flick through and ask yourself: is there anything here to have an opinion about? A book that gives a two-year-old a choice to make is worth three books with better credentials.
Two: does the art reward a second look?
Very young children do not read a book once. They live in it. The twentieth reading is not a failure of the book, it's the whole point of the book, and by then they aren't following the words at all. They're hunting the corners of the pictures.
Good picture book art holds up under that kind of attention. There are small things tucked into the background: a mouse with a candle, a sock on a washing line, a character from page six turning up again on page twenty. This is the part of illustration I find slowest and most pleasurable. The spreads in Colours of the Rainbow have a snail making his way along the bottom edge of every page. Nobody has to notice him. I like knowing he's there.
If the art is pretty but flat, and every page could be swapped with any other, a child will get bored of it at about reading four and you'll be the one carrying the book to the charity shop.
Three: how does it feel to read aloud?
This is the question I'd tattoo on my forehead if it wouldn't alarm the toddlers. Read the first two pages out loud, standing there in the shop, quietly. Your mouth will tell you things your eyes miss.
Some texts look lovely and trip you up on every line. Wrong rhythm, sentences too long to say in one breath, a clump of hard consonants where a soft word wanted to be. And some are a joy in the mouth before you've even got to the story. Nursery rhymes survived for centuries on this and we've somehow forgotten to check for it when buying new books.
Count to 10 exists because I couldn't find a counting book I actually enjoyed saying. The rhythm of it went through about forty drafts, most of which I said out loud in my kitchen with a wooden spoon in my hand, which is where most of my best decisions get made. If a book doesn't feel good to say, you will be the one dreading bedtime by Thursday.
Four: does the ending land?
Small children have an unusually fine sense of an ending being cheated. A story that stops rather than finishes will get a frown even from a pre-verbal audience, and they'll ask for it again purely to find out where it went wrong.
A good ending for this age is short, warm, and slightly rounded. The problem is resolved, everyone is safe, and there's a small door left open to whatever happens next. What it doesn't do is pause to explain what we learned today. Children can smell a lesson coming. Say the thing you want to say and let them work out the rest themselves; they will, and they'll enjoy it more for having done it alone.
Read the last page before you buy. It takes ten seconds and saves an enormous amount of anticlimax at bedtime.
Five: will it survive being loved?
A favourite book for a toddler is not a keepsake. It's a physical object that gets chewed, sat on, carried to nursery, and occasionally used as a bridge. Board books exist for very good reasons. Buying one for a child technically past the age band on the back is just sensible.
Have a look at the spine, the thickness of the pages, whether the corners are rounded. If it's a paperback going to a two-year-old, buy two copies or accept its fate. My own shelf has a copy of Count along with Poppy with the back cover sellotaped on so many times it's more sellotape than cover now. I made that one. I'm still faintly wounded about it, but the book is doing its job.
And that, really, is the last thought I'd leave you with. The book's job is to be wanted again tomorrow. Not to look handsome on a shelf, not to teach the alphabet on schedule, not to win anything. If you hand a child a book and they reach for it with both hands, you chose well, whatever the number on the back said. All four of the Poppy books got tested on my neighbour's children before anyone in a suit saw them, and that remains the only review I fully trust.