It’s a no-money day by Kate Milner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It’s difficult to tell you how important this gentle, soft book is and so I hope you will forgive me if I jump straight to the punchline: It’s A No-Money Day by Kate Milner should be on your shelves. And if you run a library or you are in a school or if you are anywhere that has shelves that are accessed publically, this book should be there twice over. We live in complex times that are often brutal for those living in precarious circumstances, and one of the duties of any librarian or educator is to work to understand and support those in such a situation. To allow their stories to be heard, supported and understood. To allow the children living within such situations to be heard, to be seen. And having books like this on the shelf is important. It just needs to be there. It should be there.
We often work to privilege the adult within children’s literature, to make ourselves feel better and be able to remember those times when the most important thing was what we’re going to have for tea. Those times when nothing mattered but finding the perfect stick, or simply standing and staring for hours at the bright bright blue of the sky. And books like this challenge that sense of comfort – they challenge the notion that everything should be kittens and rainbows because they represent something else. A childhood that is experienced by a whole world of children every day, right now. The truth of an uncomfortable and sometimes quite horrific world. This isn’t a book that channels Rousseau and puts the children in some unattainable Garden of Eden; this is a book that has curled wallpaper on the walls and mum silently crying in the background because she does not like going to the food bank.
I have such time for what Kate Milner does. My Name Is Not Refugee is a remarkable thing, deftly handled and sensitive and kind. It’s A No-Money Day is similarly remarkable; Milner balances the hard truth of this story with some wonderfully intimate moments of kindness. This is a family on the edge but they are still a family full of love and heart for each other. They are human, and I think that’s Milner’s great gift. She finds the humanity in these painful, big stories and makes them accessible and real for very small people. And, I think, for big people too. There is something to be said here for the lessons that this book can give us all. It is important, it is awful, it is necessary. Milner is doing immense things here.
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Daisy May Johnson 