Award-winning and bestselling British Nigerian author Tọlá Okogwu has a new picture book out, and we are delighted. You’ve Got This, Little Pangolin is a heartfelt, funny, and wise story about a baby pangolin named Kúyẹ who is in a tremendous hurry to grow up and do everything on his own, especially master “the ball,” the special way pangolins curl up to protect themselves. To Kúyẹ, it looks like a game. When a snake appears, he discovers it is anything but. What he learns, finally, is that new skills take time, patience, and the steady love of a mama who has always known what he needs.

It is a simple story, but it carries the kind of truth that lodges itself in a child’s heart. If you have a toddler, a young reader, or a little one in your life who could use a gentle, joyful reminder that growing up takes time, this one is for them.

Tọlá was born in Nigeria and raised in London, and her work is driven by a deep belief in the importance of children seeing themselves in books, as well as encountering other cultures and ways of life. She has built one of the most impressive bodies of work in contemporary children’s literature. Her originally self-published picture book series Daddy Do My Hair became a firm family favourite, drawing noted admirers including Thandiwe Newton and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Her debut middle grade novel, Onyeka and the Academy of the Sun, was a Waterstones Book of the Month and won the 2023 Children’s Africana Book Award for Older Readers. It was also shortlisted for the British Book Awards, the Barnes & Noble Children’s and YA Book Awards, and The Week Junior Book Awards, and longlisted for the Jhalak Prize. Recently, she published Champions of the Galaxy, a middle grade sci-fi adventure drawing comparisons to Star Wars and Marvel. She also writes under the pen name Lola Morayo and is the author of the Aziza’s Secret Fairy Door series.

With You’ve Got This, Little Pangolin, Tolá turns her attention back to the very youngest readers, and the results are wonderful. The illustrations by Shirley Hottier are vivid, colourful, and full of warmth, and the mama-and-pangopup relationship at the heart of the story is simply adorable. There is also something genuinely exciting about a picture book centred on a pangolin — an animal rarely found in children’s stories, and one whose remarkable ability to curl into a protective ball makes for a perfect metaphor for the courage and patience it takes to learn something new.

This is the kind of book you press into the hands of a parent, a teacher, or anyone who spends time with toddlers and early school-age children navigating the big feelings that come with wanting to do everything right now. It holds space for the child who is eager, impatient, and a little frustrated and reminds them, gently, that some lessons are simply worth waiting for.

Get it for the children in your life. They will ask for it again and again.

Purchase You’ve Got This, Little Pangolin here: simonandschuster.com.au