They say never meet your heroes. Meeting your daughter’s, though? Pretty fun. Pippa Goodhart and Nick Sharratt are the unassuming, slightly mischievous pair behind one of the biggest hits in children’s publishing, the multimillion-selling You Choose books – which my little girl is completely obsessed with. Look online and you’ll see parents sharing stories of how their children’s copies were so loved they fell to pieces; that no other book got a look-in at bedtime for over a year. I can wholeheartedly say every child should have a copy.
For the uninitiated, the concept is simple. Each beautifully drawn double-page spread encourages the reader to make a simple choice from a set of brightly coloured illustrations, crafting a unique day in the life (the food and pets pages are our most pored over). The first one was published 23 years ago, gaining serious momentum to become an established, beloved brand. There are now six You Choose books, with the latest (You Choose Party Time) released this month, and they have sold more than 2.5 million copies and been translated into 18 languages. A more recent board book series for even younger readers has also gathered steam, with a third coming next year (You Choose Nursery).
Surprisingly, though, it almost never happened. Goodhart, who has authored over 150 titles for children including four Winnie the Witch books (under the name Laura Owen), came up with the concept while her own children were still young. “It took a very long time to find a publisher. Nine publishers turned it down because it doesn’t tell a story,” she says, with a twinkle in her eye. “Well, it doesn’t. That’s the whole strength of it!”
Of course, it actually tells thousands of stories, which the reader is empowered to decide. The magic of You Choose is in its infinite sense of possibility: whoever picks it up could select any number of options, depending on what mood they’re in, and come up with a new story each time. It’s not a book you “read” in the traditional sense, but one you talk about and share. That’s its particular power; it’s a talisman, encouraging language skills while never compromising on readerly enjoyment.
So it’s fortunate that Goodhart persevered, unable to shake her belief in the idea. “I kept trying and trying and trying. Because you get used to most things being turned down, and sometimes you’re arrogant and think, ‘No, that one is good’.” Eventually, an editor at Random House (which has since merged with Penguin), who also had children of her own, saw its potential and asked Goodhart who her dream illustrator would be. Her answer: Nick Sharratt. Most famous for giving Jacqueline Wilson’s novels their visual identity, he has illustrated around 300 books and written many of his own. His distinctive style is full of bright colours, bold lines and a playful exuberance.
The pair had already met at a children’s book conference, where Sharratt was showing a boyhood drawing as part of a talk. It depicted a shopping centre, full of detail, spread across three pages. “I’d got carried away and just kept drawing,” he says. It could have been an early blueprint for a You Choose spread.
The process of making the first book, simply titled You Choose, was “a baptism by fire”, says Sharratt. He created illustrations digitally for the first time, and “I’d never really used a computer before, so I taught myself as I went along and made lots of mistakes. Like not saving things, having spent a whole day colouring a page and then it all disappeared.”
Still, despite its popularity with young families, You Choose flew under the radar for a while. “Nobody shortlisted it for prizes or even reviewed it as far as I remember,” says Goodhart. Wendy Cooling, the late founder of children’s reading charity Bookstart, was an important champion and ensured it reached thousands of young readers, but success mostly came from word of mouth.
It took a decade for another You Choose book to arrive. First called Just Imagine, it has since been retitled You Choose Your Dreams – and Sharratt almost wasn’t involved, reluctant after the exhausting process of creating the original book, with plans to use a different illustrator. “The first one was like giving birth, you know, you think, ‘I’m not doing that again’,” jokes Goodhart. Fortunately, Sharratt changed his mind, and the books have been published at an ever-increasing pace since then.
They come up with the pages together, writing long lists of ideas of what to include on train journeys and over email, leaving no stone unturned. (“Have you ever had anyone say there wasn’t an animal on the animals page?” Sharratt asks Goodhart. She hasn’t – and neither has he.) They have drawn inspiration from a rich tradition of books that allow children to browse packed visual scenes, from Richard Scarry’s stories to Would You Rather? by John Burningham to The Baby’s Catalogue by Janet and Allan Ahlberg (and, in fact, the actual Argos catalogue).
Each book has three characters who appear on every page – a boy, a girl and an animal – and eagle-eyed readers will see certain characters recur across the series’ expanding universe. It has always been important to both authors that the books are inclusive, that all children can see themselves represented in the pages. You Choose Party Time features sign language, the pair having been guided by Goodhart’s daughter, who is a speech and language therapist for adults with learning disabilities.
I picked up a copy of You Choose for my daughter on a slow day of solo parenting a few months ago, looking for something to amuse her. She only recently turned 19 months, so I knew the speaking and discussion element wouldn’t yet come into play – but she loves books and had just started to show an interest in pointing at pictures, so I was intrigued as to what she’d make of it. (Plus, as a millennial raised on the books of Wilson, I felt a siren call of nostalgia.)
Some pages were too abstract (horizons, hobbies, shoes – she still has little concept of shoes), but she lit up at anything that resembled things she knew (faces, food, animals). On a page full of drawings of people, she started to laugh at an illustration of a baby. “Where’s the baby?” I asked, a few days later. She’d laugh and point. It was one of the first times I realised she was beginning to develop language and could recognise the things she knew from her own life.
Since then, her attachment to it has only grown. On a trip to visit family, if she ever felt tired or unsettled, there was only one solution. “Get the book!” It’s proven an incredible way of helping her learn words. She points at something so we’ll say the word for her; we’ll say the word of something and she’ll point at it. A brilliant page in You Choose Party Time has a spread of birthday cakes, one in the shape of a football. “Ball!” she now says as she points, practising one of her newest words. Goodhart says one of her own grandsons has been trained on the books, too.
It’s a sign of their versatility, and Goodhart and Sharratt always wanted them to appeal to a wide range of ages. “You can use it in all sorts of ways,” says Goodhart. “It’s a snuggle up on your lap and share book. You know, ‘I’ll choose for you and you choose for me.’ But also children just by themselves – you’ll find five of them in a corner in the classroom, talking, talking, talking. So often the teacher says, ‘That child never talks’.”
“They are used a lot by speech therapists and child counsellors as well,” adds Sharratt. “They find you can have a conversation with the book and learn quite a lot about the children they’re working with by what they choose, if they change their mind about things.” Other families use them to play games: find something red, find something beginning with the letter B. In the fight to re-establish reading for pleasure from the earliest of ages and to resist the lure of screens, all of this is essential. But it’s also key to building and nurturing relationships, helping forge intimate bonds through the focused attention of sharing a book.
Goodhart and Sharratt receive many heartfelt letters from readers, and Sharratt even dedicated one edition to “all those who have shared their battered You Choose books with me”.
“It’s always nice when you’re doing a signing and there are families who come up, and they’re a bit bashful,” he says. “And then they reveal a completely torn and tattered copy of You Choose. And I just absolutely love that, that a book has been looked at so often that it’s literally falling apart.” Ours already has a chewed-off corner and one page coming loose. I wonder how long it will withstand it; I sense it has a fair amount of service to come.
‘You Choose Party Time’ is out now, published by Puffin, with more You Choose books to come next year. Pippa Goodhart and Nick Sharratt will be at Henley Literary Festival on Sunday 11 October; henleyliteraryfestival.co.uk
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