When the Birds Wake Up – at a glance
The School Reading Lists’ five word review: Music, memory and finding courage.
Children’s book title: When the Birds Wake Up.
Children’s poet: Jessica Mary Ellis.
Children’s illustrator: Sophie Burrows.
Genre: Children’s poetry / verse novel.
Published by: David Fickling Books.
ISBN: 9781788454100.
Recommended for children aged: 8-12.
First published: Paperback September 2026.
This children’s book is ideal for: children who enjoy emotionally rich verse novels about family change, friendship, bullying, music and caring for a grandparent with dementia.
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Our review:
Life changes for ten-year-old Pear when her parents decide to leave their town and go to live with her grandma in her house in the country. She is beginning to show signs of dementia and will need to be cared for. They acquire a scruffy rescue dog, Piglet. Pear writes letters to her best friend Annie, keeping her informed about the changes in her life. At her new school, things don’t start well. She is bullied and teased about her ears, which she feels she has to keep continually covered. Lucy, the leader of the bullies, is a cold tormentor. She makes a friend in Reece, a calm, sympathetic boy, who joins her family for meals and holidays. A constant cause of Pear’s anxiety is the forthcoming school assembly, at which she is expected to play a solo on her violin. But the big throbbing bass note behind everything is the slow, unstoppable disappearance of her grandma’s memory.
Jessica Mary Ellis has skilfully and carefully constructed the narrative in a series of poems, letters, notes and meditations. Take it from me; this isn’t an easy thing to do well. All the trials and tensions of being ten, in new surroundings and trying to find new friends, as well as the joys and hopes of that time, are presented with memorable clarity, using images and musicality which some great poets of the past, I’m sure, would be proud to have pulled off.
This is how the doctor explains to Pear’s mother, and how she, in turn, explains to Pear, what is happening:
…the brain is like a town,
lots of roads, buildings, shops.
roads help you remember things…..
Alzheimer’s disease is
a storm in the town.
Winds blowing down the trees,
blocking roads
crashing into shop windows
crushing buildings….
We see this image reappear at different stages of the narrative, deftly interwoven with other strands and themes.
When grandma cannot be cared for properly at her old home any more, she moves into specialist accommodation. The place is compared to a lighthouse:
Grandma’s new home
now feels homely.
It’s a lighthouse
bringing home the boats
that have ridden waves
and survived storms
for their whole lives.
It’s a lighthouse
helping them steer
through fog
back to shore
back to safety.
It is
A light beaming through the dark.
All the characters, and the reader, gradually see the revealing of other characters’ personalities and motives in the multi-stranded development of the drama. I could quote whole chunks of it, but that would spoil everything. At the end, I was moved, both by the emotional depth and truth of the story and in sheer admiration of the various techniques which the author so skilfully uses to compose her tale.
I loved the whole thing and I’m sure you will too.
Many thanks to David Fickling Books for the review copy.
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