We send Somebody Swallowed Stanley with pleasure. It does what most environmental picture books fumble, which is stay warm while making its point.
Stanley is a plastic bag. He drifts through the ocean narrating what happens to him, which is that he is mistaken for a jellyfish and repeatedly swallowed by sea creatures who quickly realise he is not food and spit him out again. Eventually he washes up on a beach where a child picks him up and puts him in a bin.
Sarah Roberts is an animal behaviourist. Her specialism is shark behaviour, and she spends part of her working life on environmental education for children. She has also written a picture book, and the reason the book works is that Roberts knows what she is talking about. Sea creatures do mistake plastic bags for jellyfish. Turtles do swallow them and die. The book is doing real teaching inside a playful shape, and the shape holds because the author has the facts.
Hannah Peck illustrates. Her gouache work keeps the mood buoyant, which is the right word for a book about an ocean bag. It would be easy for a picture book on this subject to feel heavy, and Peck’s palette lifts it.
Somebody Swallowed Stanley is endorsed by the Marine Conservation Society. We pack it into class sets when a school is running World Ocean Day or a plastic-pollution topic. It earns its place.