The Joy Thief! is a story that helps children and adults to discover more about a subject that is often difficult to understand. Demonstrating the subjectivity of trauma, The Joy Thief! highlights how a seemingly ordinary occurrence can have a significant impact upon the wellbeing of a child, particularly if left unaddressed.

Challenging the idea that trauma only occurs during more “serious” incidents, The Joy Thief! leads us to conclude that such occurrences, or rather our responses to them, may be more significant for children’s mental health than we would perhaps like to admit.

The story of The Joy Thief! encourages help-seeking, while challenging adults to consider the way they handle such situations.

The story is written in a person-centred fashion, seeking to normalize a range of outcomes that children may experience following a traumatic experience – including the little-acknowledged phenomena of imaginary “friends.”

>Whilst highlighting positive themes of intersectional diversity, The Joy Thief! also challenges us to consider issues of parental absence, inattention, and invalidation within the context of the needs of children.

Above all, The Joy Thief! is a story of hope.

Book review

This is an excellent book for both parents and children as it demonstrates perfectly how a certain situation or occurrence in the young person’s life can affect their behavior, attitude and thought process.

The vibrant and vivid pictures support the written text in showing how and why the child is behaving and thinking the way they are. It also demonstrates how a child can be bothered by a certain issue and how afraid they are to openly speak about it.

Any parent instinctively knows when something is wrong and upsetting their child and this book demonstrates how to deal with the issue, and get the child to be open and trust their parents to help them overcome the problem.

The story is important as it has taught the child to deal with trauma, and how to explain things when they have grown up and become a parent themselves to their own children. The Joy Thief is a very well-written and illustrated story, perfect of any parent or child to read to help them be open, honest and most of all share their fears so they can be resolved and make them feel like a child should.