Book Review: ‘Atlas and Skye’ by Emma Smith-Barton

Onwy Gower

This is Newport-born Emma Smith-Barton’s second novel, with the first (The Million Pieces of Neena Gill) being nominated for Waterstones Children’s Book Award, the Branson Boase Award and the Romantic Novelist’s Association Debut Romantic Novel Award 2020.

Atlas and Skye depicts a pair of ten year olds who embark on a voyage to find lost memories. The titular characters are both searching for understanding as Atlas moves in with his grandfather who is losing his memories due to dementia and Skye battles to remember her grandmother who recently passed away.

All of these adventures coincide with typical childhood struggles with friendship as Atlas and Skye try to navigate their friendship through all of their mishaps.

Friendship

Their friendship blossoms as a result of Atlas needing to move schools after moving in with his grandfather. This creates the task of making new friends all the more difficult considering Atlas found it difficult at his last school, without the added stress of his grandfather’s diagnosis.

Skye herself is facing difficulties as her sister, Sicily, moves away to university and Skye’s bestfriend distances herself after befriending a fellow classmate during their time at football camp over summer. This leaves Skye alone until Atlas enters the class and is told to sit next to her. This begins their winding adventure together.

Chapters 

Each chapter switches between the titular characters perspectives. Alongside this, the characters bring various layouts to differentiate between the two. Whilst Atlas uses the typical structure expected in a book, Skye’s chapters utilise different sizing and spacing of words to emphasize her thoughts and tone at the time. This creative use of layout deepens the connection between characters and readers in a bold and interesting way.

We also sporadically see gorgeous illustrations by Chita Erayanie which delve deeper into the appearances of the characters and locations. In the story, Atlas’ grandfather is an illustrator which links nicely with the illustrations seen in the book.

Mysterious bird

Atlas also begins to see a mysterious bird as his adventure to regain his grandfathers memory unfolds. He first sees the bird in a picture of him with his grandfather and from there he starts to see the bird more and more often. The bird seemingly offers guidance to Atlas as he tries to help his grandfather, no matter how dangerous the mission becomes. 

Resilience

Overall, this book is a wonderful tale of love’s resilience through times of forgetting with colourful themes of betrayal, loss and hope running through it. Emma Smith-Barton manages to deal with these themes with maturity whilst maintaining their readability for a younger audience in a beautiful way. 

‘Atlas and Skye’ by Emma Smith-Barton is published by Puffin Books and is available to buy at all good bookstores

---

Get more trusted Welsh news

Choose Nation.Cymru as a preferred source in Google News to see more of our journalism.