How Hattie Hated Kindness is a story for children locked in rage or hate. Hattie lives by herself on an island. She likes sharks, and crabs and stinging centipedes. She likes anything hard and spiky. Lots of people try to bring kindness to Hattie on her island, but each time she is very horrid to them, smashing and spoiling everything they try to do for her. So after a while they all stop coming to the island. Hattie is very alone. So she sits by the water's edge and tries to figure out why she hates love and loves hate.

She thinks it must be because she is a very bad girl indeed. But the lapping water-over-her-toes helps Hattie to understand that because she'd been a very sad and frightened little girl in a too hard world, she had become hard too, so that the awful fear and the awful pain would go away. The lapping-water-over-her-toes helps Hattie to move from cruel to kind. In the end, Hattie builds a bridge to the warm and cosy world across the water.