PoppetA bit of us
Is Poppet real?
It's the question children ask first — in a whisper, at the end of a story. And the honest answer is: more of this is real than you might think.
The children are real.
Luna and Louis, and their friends, are real — real children at a real school in London. Their names might not match the children they were drawn from, but the characters are inspired by real individuals: the dreamer who asks why, the fearless one who leaps first, the quiet watcher who misses nothing, the fierce little champion of what's fair, the chatterbox full of half-built ideas, the tender one who feels everything twice. And they're not the only ones — a whole small cast walked in from real life, each borrowed gently: the people already around you, all beautifully different.
Friendly, in the way children are kind before anyone teaches them to be — and underneath all that ordinary childness, they think in surprisingly big ways: innocent and complicated at once, small people asking the kind of question that stops a grown-up mid-sentence.
Children from different homes and cultures, thinking and counting and dreaming in different languages, sharing one classroom — so many of these moments caught, whole, from real life. The kindness you see is real. The uniqueness is real. Every one of these beautifully different children is real.
Louis
The one who stops
Louis is the one who stops. A snail climbing the wall. The moon still out at breakfast. The way a puddle holds the whole sky in it. He sees these things, and he wants to know why — asking the small questions grown-ups have quietly forgotten to ask. And when something truly grips him, he falls all the way in — so far that you can call his name three times and he won't hear you, and no clock or coaxing can turn him to anything else until he's ready. The world simply has to wait.
There is, as it happens, a boy exactly like this. You might even know him.
Luna
The one who works it out
Luna is Louis's sister — braver than she lets on, and kinder than she needs to be. She's the one who works things out when they go wrong, who holds a smaller hand in the dark, and who's never too proud to be the first to try. She tries so hard to be the best at everything — yet can't stop herself drifting off, mid-lesson, mid-sentence, into a daydream that carries her clean away. And she's hard on herself for it, certain she's fallen short of perfect; she just hasn't noticed what everyone around her already has — that she is perfect, exactly as she is.
There is a girl exactly like this, too. Her name isn't Luna. Everything else is hers.
Many faces · many tongues
A mixed little world
Look closely and it isn't one kind of child at all. Different homes, different cultures, different first words. Tomás thinks in Portuguese a heartbeat before he thinks in English; another counts in a language spoken half a world away. A mixed, many-storied, many-tongued little crowd — the way a real London playground actually looks.
Nobody set out to make a point of it. It's simply true to the children it was drawn from.
Every one of these children learns a little differently — and that's the whole idea. They're lucky: they're held by people who make room for them, at home and at school.
See how Poppet is built for different learners →And Poppet?
Poppet
The one thing not borrowed from any street you know
Which leaves the question the children actually asked. Poppet is the one friend here who wasn't drawn from a real doorstep — he wandered in, instead, from a lifelong love of science-fiction: of far-off worlds, and gentle visitors who cross the dark not to conquer a planet but to befriend one child on it. Where he comes from within the stories is a longer tale, told a little at a time.
Is he real? He's real enough to make a shy child braver, and a maths question feel like an adventure. Real enough to be missed between stories. Whether he's more than that… well — some questions are lovelier left open, and we're in no hurry to close this one.
Every family has a Luna and a Louis. Maybe, somewhere, every child has a Poppet too.
Come and meet them where they're happiest — in the middle of a story.