change | friendship | fun | heart-opening | inspiration | picture book
The Boy from Mars by Simon James
With engaging, nicely-written text and easy flowing illustrations, this is a warm and helpful book.
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The Woman Who Turned Children Into Birds by David Almond
What a delight! David Almond’s typically powerful and subtle writing, beautifully enhanced by Laura Carlin’s artwork. The whole book sings. Mysterious Nanty Solo comes to town. A Pied Piper who is not abductor, but liberator. She frees the children and the children free the adults. Happy town. Buy through Bookshop.org
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The Tree Lady by H Joseph Hopkins
This is Katherine Olivia Sessions’ story. A tree planter who made a life-enhancing contribution to San Diego, the city that became her home. And in demonstrating the possibility of greening an apparently unpromising environment she set an example that spread across the world and forward to our own time, when tree planting feels more important…
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Keats’s Neighborhood: An Ezra Jack Keats Treasury
“If we could see each other exactly as the other is,” Ezra Jack Keats wrote, “this would be a different world.” The son of Polish immigrants escaping anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe, the world he grew up in was Brooklyn, New York. Ezra’s family had always been poor but during the Great Depression of the 1930s, along…
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Amos & Boris by William Steig
A mouse and a whale best friends; there’s a challenge for a writer and artist to set himself. But William Steig was the man to tackle it. Best known now as creator of Shrek, he was growing up in New York during the Great Depression, found himself supporting his parents, dropped in and out of art…
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all the books | fun | picture book | thoughts
It’s a Book by Lane Smith
Fed up with electronic devices glued to your child – or to you? Here’s a nice way of addressing the habit that’s funny and clever, so it becomes a great bridge on which parent and child can meet and watch the river flowing and share viewpoints and find peace. Smart and stylish illustrations from Lane…
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Mole in a Black and White Hole by Tereza Sediva
Mole’s good friend the pink chandelier, only colour in his underground world (apart from worms, of whom he seems a little scared) suddenly vanishes, leaving a hole to the sky and a world of colour. What might be a simple dark to light, monochrome to rainbow journey, is more subtle and more playful. I like…
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The Rhythm of the Rain by Grahame Baker-Smith
Issac is playing by the stream and wonders where the water he pours back into it from his jam jar goes. Minimal text and a journey across a mythic world shows a child the rain cycle. Dreamy pictures combine with simple scientific exposition. Facts are presented hand in hand with the mystery and beauty of…
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adventure | all the books | friendship | fun | heart-opening | inspiration | picture book | spiritual
Hurrah for Horace by Christopher Sell
Well. this one is my own. It’s taken a while. To quote C.S.Lewis in his introduction to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, “when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books”. Mostly pictures with just a few words, Hurrah for Horace takes you through a day with Horace…
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adventure | all the books | friendship | fun | heart-opening | picture book
How to Hide a Lion by Helen Stephens
A lovely warm book with some of the silliness a child can enjoy. At the same time it quietly addresses the development of a child’s existence as she becomes distinct and other than her parents. Alice’s mum and dad don’t notice there’s lion in the house for ages and when they do they have completely…
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Katie Morag Delivers the Mail by Mairi Hedderwick
It’s great to see a book set in an environment distant from what most readers will be familiar with. Based on her own island life the author/illustrator not only brings a community to life, but makes it coherent too. She conveys a real feeling for how everyone (including the animals who crop up all over…
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adventure | all the books | friendship | fun | inspiration | picture book
Zog by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler
One of the great writer / artist collaborations, Axel Scheffler’s simultaneously down-to-earth and slightly dotty illustrations complement Julia Donaldson’s stomping rhythms and plonking good rhymes and together they carry the reader along with great good cheer, safely past fears and busting a few shibboleths on the way. Here we have a school for dragons and…
