Max the Brave

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The story that Max the Brave tells is so simple. Yet, it is so interactive and enabled me to have a lovely discussion with my sister about bravery and animals. I love it so much that I’m considering borrowing a copy from my local library to bring it into my classroom for my students to enjoy. Although this image is quite tiny, I found this particular illustration where he climbs a tree full of birds to inquire abt mice esp cute! (Yes, birds make me swoon!) Max was born six days late on the 29th August 2018. The birth was straightforward with Suzie having a 4-hour labour with a natural birth. “We were over the moon, he was absolutely perfect in every single way.” Determined to be heroic, rather than sweet, Max the kitten goes in search of a mouse to hunt, since hunting mice is what brave cats do. Not sure just what a mouse looks like, Max interrogates a number of creatures, asking each one whether they are a mouse. When he finally does meet a mouse, that enterprising little creature assures him that he is a monster, and that the mouse Max is looking for is actually the sleeping monster nearby...

Max is such a cute little kitten that people call him sweet and dress him up in ribbons. But he hates ribbons, and he doesn’t want to be sweet! He sees himself as a brave and courageous mouse catcher. There’s only one problem: he doesn’t know what a mouse looks like. He searches high and low and asks the birds, the fly, and the elephant if they are mice. Finally, he finds someone who maybe be able to help--or maybe his ally has ulterior motives. When Max finally confronts the monster, he realizes that being Max the Brave may not be as great as he thought. The staff allowed us to have the chance to see Max again and to have some sort of quality of life. Even though he was so young, he was still happy to be in the room on the ward, he enjoyed his time there. They also allowed us to be able to say goodbye to him, I’m not sure that would have been the case if we hadn’t been treated at GOSH." I'm so glad I finally got a chance to read it and I found it quite amoosing. And I'm sure this sentiment will be shared by anybody who reads it! |But Max will not let sth this trivial deter him. He goes around asking everybody he runs into if they're a mouse! Max was so poorly, he struggled to make it out of ITU, which meant we had to leave him every night to stay in the hospital accommodation. We are so grateful that’s around because we don’t live locally, so it would have taken us about an hour and a half to travel into the hospital each day. So be able to just walk around the corner was just amazing. It’s never nice having to leave your child, but we knew that when he was in ITU, he was under 24-hour one-on-one supervision, so it gave us peace of mind to know we were so close by."Ed Vere tells us more about Max, and why it's so important for adults to love picture books How do you feel about Max the Brave being chosen for Bookstart Treasure?

The fundraising helps me feel like I’m still being a mum to Max, because I’m not going to get to take him to football practice, or buy school uniform, so my way of doing that for him is to help other children. It’s all in his name and in his memory, so it makes me feel like I’m being his mum, I know I always will be.” We got to September and I just thought what else are we going to do? I remembered that we were going to do the race and I thought we could still do it. We made little Max the Brave t-shirts and had a really nice time; it was wonderful to bring all the family over for something positive, as the last time we had all been together was at Max’s funeral. To all meet up for something happy, we were all buzzing afterwards.” Max is always asking: are you a mouse? Which really gets the interactive part going. My sister is consistently responding to the book, yelling out answers — which is when I know a book is great for kids and for use in class. It also gets a discussion going: is Max brave?

After a 2-hour procedure, Max had been saved, the fluid had been drained and he was now on a ventilator to give him a rest.” I’d actually done the race the year before I was pregnant with Max, when I was first starting to get into running. Never did I ever think I would ever benefit from the charity."