Chasing the Shy Town

New York Public Library, Best Children’s Books of 2024 List

Senan uses his binoculars to spy out the Shy Town, a sweet little place on a hill, with winding streets and red and yellow roofs. Senan calls it the Shy Town because it often hides and is hard to find.

He tells his next-door friend Joshua about the Shy Town, and they set off, with Senan’s grandmother in a ramshackle wheelchair, to find this elusive place. Along the way they make friends with Paperboy. Who is, as you’d expect, a boy made of paper.

With the help of a kruckle (a sort of Shy Town creature) that they meet on their journey, they find the Shy Town, only its real name is Perfection, because it is absolutely perfect.

But all is not well in Perfection: the inhabitants are constantly worrying about making it more and more perfect.

But since more perfect than perfect is an impossibility, they are constantly exhausted.

What can Senan and friends do to save the kruckles from their obsession with perfection?

Erika McGann is an award-winning children’s author based in Dublin. She has written a wide range of children’s books, including Where Are You, Puffling? (with illustrator Gerry Daly) and Tabitha Plimtock and the Edge of the World (with illustrations by Phillip Cullen), which was awarded a White Raven by the International Youth Library.