Personalised books for children shouldn’t have a bad name

I used to think that inserting a particular child’s name into a story was missing the point of imaginative stories. Reader, I was wrong

I used to be entirely snobbish about personalised books, chalking them up not as “proper stories”, but vehicles for custom-tailored self-centredness; shouldering out the crucial development of empathy in favour of a narrowly-focused me, me, me. All that changed when a less lemon-lipped friend gave my train-crazed three-year-old a personalised Thomas the Tank Engine book for last year’s birthday.

It came with a preschooler-pleasing certificate from the Fat Controller, but that wasn’t its main appeal. When my daughter realised that she was actually IN the story, having a birthday party on board Annie and Clarabel and being allowed into the cab to sound Thomas’s whistle, she expanded with silent bliss, like one of the balloons tied to the beloved’s buffers. True, “You” and the Birthday Surprise might not have been a staggering work of literature, but her evident joy in it made reading (and rereading) it at bedtime much less taxing than ploughing through some of her other favourites, “straight” Thomas books included. She still seeks it out on a regular basis (and has not yet, at least to the casual eye, lost touch with reality).