Ladybird SunStart Series

The classic reader for island kids

Unlike the British Peter & Jane reading scheme, we never did get the names of the boy and girl in the Sunstart series and we didn't really care because they were living full, island lives, just like us. Flying kites, regularly going to the beach, fishing down in the village, playing lucky dip at the Christmas bazaar, dancing in the rain, making Mas for the parade of bands at carnival time...

The brown-skinned characters were normal; what else would they be, when everyone across the islands from your prime minister to the local vagrant were brown-skinned, too?  Dad and the boy had a little 'fro happening, but sadly, mum and the girl couldn't escape the era-specific, hot comb hair press. There were Indo-Caribbean neighbours, and there were fruit vendors wearing simple headwraps to the market. The people in the books did their sewing on old-timey treadle machines like the ones our grandmothers used. And they all played cricket in the streets!

The illustrations were more akin to paintings, so vibrant and enthralling that class time would be spent daydreaming about skipping over river stones instead of practicing one's reading for Miss before recess. Distractions were rife across these books, and the attention to detail in each coloured plate meant you could spend the entire lesson counting individual breeze blocks and louvres on the little house seen through the living room window on page.

Then, there was the cultural specificity. Many book entries in the series spent multiple pages describing the communal aspects and costumery of carnival, the history of the Arawaks and Caribs on the islands, or the geological composition of island terra firma. In truth, most childhood island dreams about what one could be as an adult first came from the images in these books.

The covers have been updated somewhat since the 70s but thankfully, the charm of these illustrations haven't changed much over the decades.