I absolutely love a dress with pockets - a beautiful book about a girl visiting the dress shop with her aunt and all the dresses the shop has to offer but she doesn’t want any of those dresses she wants a special dress with pockets. And who doesn’t love a dress with pockets.

Absolutely adore this book and my daughters aged 6 and 7 love it too! When it comes down to it we all love a dress with pockets - the more practical solution. The illustrations really bring the words and story to life for my daughters. There’s so much to look at on each colourful page. This is the best story we have read at bedtime together for ages. I can see this big being a big hit and I’ll be buying it as a gift for my daughters friends. Wonderful and full of imagination!

Lily Murray’s A Dress with Pockets is beautifully rendered and perfectly depicted in Jenny Lovlie’s ever-perfect illustrations. Lovlie always brings such tenderness in her gentle palette designs. The end papers alone reflect this but, as seen in her illustrations of Lauren Ace’s The Boys and The Girls, Lily Murray’s story is enhanced by the exquisitely thoughtful details.

In this story, the immaculately dressed Aunt Augusta takes young frog-loving Lucy to The Fabulous Fashion Store to buy her a new dress. Here, all manner of frocks are on sale, with a suitably brilliant flash of humour on display in the whimsical and witty designs. My daughter pours over the images choosing her (many) favourites!

Lucy, however, has a particular demand in mind: a dress with pockets that caters for her creepy crawly collection and nature-loving needs! This mucky notion is, again, beautifully treated by both the writer and illustrator team. I’m particularly fond of the image of Lucy digging in her perfectly-pocketed dream dress with layers of fossils, shells, ants nests and creepy crawlies, dinosaur bones, forgotten toys and buried treasures revealed beneath the surface of the earth.

Not only is the story a visual feast, the language is lyrical and packed with gentle humour. And the final tease? Well, I won’t give it away but Aunt Augusta’s purchase is spot on!

We highly recommend this book and will be adding a physical copy to our own collection - as well as to those of a couple of pocket-dress loving friends!

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC copy in return for our honest review.

A jolly book, that has a girl taken to a dress shop by her aunt. What follows is the dressmaker's patter in brilliantly sustained and metered rhyme, offering every kind of dress short of BDSM ones. But if you have read the book's title you might know the girl wants a specific requirement... The final punchline is brilliant, the exuberance of the verse demands reading aloud – and not just once – and the audience will be nicely divided between those wanting something the dressmaker wants and those thinking like our heroine. Also, if it matters to you, the leads are POC.