CELEBRATING difference: Craig Pomranz’s Made by Raffi. Photograph courtesy amazon.com

WERE YOU ONE of the “normal” set in primary school? Did you go around proclaiming things like “Look how short she is! She must be two years old, not seven. Do you think she’s a midget, maybe!” or “Let’s tease the fat boy with the red hair and tell him how ugly he is!” In so many respects, this is so-called normal behaviour. Children construct their own identity among their peers by the yardsticks of sameness and difference.

And often it is the child who is different from everyone else who gets ostracised, and turned into a scapegoat to be jeered at – be it the child who has red hair, the child who is shorter, bigger, fatter, darker than everyone else; the child who is more intelligent, more talented, more taciturn, more foreign. And always, it is these very children who have to construct their own identity using different margins of self-hood. Craig Pomranz’s Made by Raffi engages these issues head on, with a boy who can knit.

Illustrated with simplicity and freshness by Margaret Chamberlain, the book is succinct and lucid and even touches on gender issues briefly, but poignantly enough to matter and not be inappropriate, to a child who is just on the point of learning to read by themselves.

Raffi is not like the other children. He likes to wear bright colours. He likes to keep his hair longer than most. He’s quietly spoken and is afraid of the loud and rambunctious children who push and shout. He gravitates to the teachers at break because he perceives a sense of stability to exude from them – and he knows they won’t tease him. Knitting – and sewing – become sanctuaries for him and turn his status amongst his peers around.

Structured and functioning with the same type of focus as Hans Christian Andersen’s Ugly Duckling, or Julianne Moore’s Strawberry Freckleface, Made by Raffi contains all the important elements that impress child readers. There is a fabulous sense of detail in the drawings of the children in Raffi’s class which keep you focused on each page, and above all there is a sense of levity conjoined with earnestness that keeps the story real – whether your child is the one who’s different or the one who notices differences in others.

• Made by Raffi by Craig Pomranz is illustrated by Margaret Chamberlain and was published by Janetta Otter-Barry Books, in the UK and the USA in 2014. It is available through amazon.com: amazon.com/Made-Raffi-Craig-Pomranz/dp/1847804330 and loot.co.za: http://www.loot.co.za/search?cat=b&terms=made+by+raffi