Mother and daughter driving home in bucketing rain. What shall we call your new sister who’s coming? That’s all really, and names written on the steamed-up car windows. But there’s something magic that Bob Graham produces out of the completely ordinary business of getting home in the wet. A lay-by, a petrol pump, windscreen wipers and headlights: all touched with grace – or should that be Grace?
Who would think little bits of torn paper could be so expressive! And what a great title: not ‘Lost’, but ‘A Bit Lost’, just like a child owning to a fear and being brave at the same time. Little Owl falls out of the nest, but finds friends and friends help him find his mummy….
The inestimable Oliver Jeffers is angry. Angry about greed and bossiness, and this is his Aesop’s fable. I like morality tales; I learnt a lot from Aesop and from ‘Aesop in the shadows’, as Beatrix Potter expressed it in her dedication for The Tale of Johnny Town Mouse and as so many others through the centuries could. …
I like this book: there’s a warmth and delicacy here. But it and almost all of the books by this Finnish emigre to Canada are now out of print. It was published in 1964 and illustrated by the prolific and foxy Edward Ardizzone. Foxy, because for me there’s a mystery about his work; it is…
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…
The power of the imagination to create joy or find joy already present, beautifully imagined as visual metaphor and step by step story of Millie’s walk home from school. A simple, powerful idea stylishly and lovingly delivered, with quiet touches of humour all the way. You may be little, you may have an empty purse,…
“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…
