Saturday, Sunday (Natalie Kate Forbes, illus Danny Snell, Affirm)

Weekends are so busy for families, with the competing demands of sports and activities, seeing friends and extended family, shopping for the week and more. Saturday, Sunday captures this frantic fullness of ‘downtime’ as a family of four races across each page through these activities, plus visiting the library, playing in the park, eating, clothing themselves and ensuring the dog is fed. Natalie Kate Forbes’s short, breathless lines punctuate Danny Snell’s movement-filled illustrations. Exclamation marks and bolded words enhance this sense of hurry. But there’s a twist when we get to Sunday: the family has packed all their tasks into Saturday so they can have ‘a day just for fun’. Now, the illustrations expand across the page, and the text is centred, as the family enjoys tea and toast in bed with the dog at their feet. There are pages of toys and noise, togetherness in the garden, a picnic and the big sky; at the day’s end, the extended family cooks together and reads. Snell’s soft illustrations convey a cosiness and richness of family life across both the tight, busy panels and the expansive, slow-day ones. The book will be fun in its familiarity for adults reading to kids aged 2+, and there are plenty of objects in each panel that the kids can point out and engage with.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Angela Meyer is an author and lecturer in writing and publishing at RMIT. She is a former publisher and bookseller. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Reviews