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In Can I Build Another Me? by Shinsuke Yoshitake, a young boy comes up with a master plan to avoid doing his chores: he spends all his pocket money on a robot to take his place. “From now on, you’re going to be the new me! […] But don’t let anyone know. You must behave exactly like me.”

But in order to be exactly like the young boy, the robot needs to know everything about the person he will be imitating. All sorts of questions, exploring everything from the boy’s physical characteristics, to likes and dislikes, via feelings and much more follow. Gradually the robot builds up a fairly comprehensive picture of what the boy is like, but will the master plan to avoid chores succeed or will Mum see through the robot straight away?

This very funny, marvellously philosophical picture book offers so many opportunities for thinking about who we are, why we behave the way we do and how we can and do change over time. It’s reflective and reassuring, creating a space full of laughter to talk about feelings, hopes and friendships. Every page offers lots of opportunities for conversations, at the same time as being full of acute and humurous observations about what it can be like being a child, trying to learn how to navigate your way in the world.

Yoshitake’s illustrations, often reminiscent of comic strips, with multiple panels on each page, are full of fabulous detail offering as much to pore over as the text does. Stylishly designed with just a few colours and a great variety of pace (some pages have lots of sections, others are given over to a single spread), the relatively simplicity of the line drawings allows Yoshitake’s fantastical imagination to flourish.

An empowering, laughter-fuelled, imagination-sparking, reflection-inducing delight, Can I Build Another Me? is meaty and marvellous, silly and serious all at once. A triumph!

We don’t ever really need an excuse for making robots out of junk. Nevertheless, we gratefully took reading Can I Build Another Me? as an opportunity to get creative with old plastic boxes and the glue gun, to create a few mini-me-robots:

Whether they are really just like us or not, they definitely have a sense of personality!

As well as making mini-me-robots, we made keepsake booklets about ourselves, inspired by the questions raised by Yoshitake in his book.

We really enjoyed filling them in, and I suspect they will be great fun to look back on in a year or more, to see how our feelings about ourselves and who we are has changed.

I learned a few things about my own kids as we filled in these booklets. “I can put a whole carrot in my mouth,” wrote M…., whilst J likes DIY and ceilidhs.

If you want to have a go at making your own Can I Build Another Me? inspired booklet, click here to download the pdf file to print off (we printed the pages back to back, then folded them in half and stapled them together along the spine).

Whilst making our robots and filling in our notebooks we listened to:

Other activities which might work well alongside reading include:

If you liked this post you might like these other posts by me, featuring picture books with a philosophical theme:

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Disclosure: I was sent a free review copy of this book by the publisher. NB Although the book was translated from Japanese, no named translator is given in the bibliographic details.

A joyous celebration of a child’s imaginative, intrepid and open-hearted take on the world, Where My Feet Go by Birgitta Sif (@birgittasif) follows one young panda recounting what they’ve been up to that day.

From exploring outside and playing in the sandpit to using their parent as a climbing frame before bedtime, we read and hear that Panda has had a very happy day getting up to all sorts of adventures, traversing jungles and even meeting with dinosaurs. Yet the illustrations show a slightly different story, one apparently much more like a normal day that anybody might experience, involving puddles, sticks and feeding the birds. This funny mismatch between words and images is bound to create conversations and spark listeners’ own re-imaginings of the world around them.

Whimsical, upbeat and wide-eyed, Panda (who could be either a boy or a girl, for the gender is never mentioned, opening out this heartwarming story so really anyone can identify with Panda) reminds me a little of Charlie’s Lola. Sif’s subdued palette and the natural story arc heading for bedtime make this a calm, relaxing and uplifting read about a child’s ability to think big and embrace adventure, reminding us adults to open our eyes to the joy and delights we might otherwise overlook in the everyday world around us.

Inspired by Panda’s adventurous feet we decided we’d try making plaster of paris casts of our footprints. I made a batch of playdough which, when cooled, the kids stepped into:

(If you’ve never made homemade playdough before it’s super easy. For this activity we used 4 cups of flour, 2 cups of salt, 8 tablespoons of Cream of Tarter, 4 tablespoons of oil and 4 cups of boiling water, mixed all together over a low heat on the hob, until the ingredients combined and came away from the edge of the pan without sticking to our fingers when we touched it.)

In an old icecream tub we mixed up some plaster of paris as per the instructions on the packet and then poured the thick gloop into the impressions left by the kids’ feet in the playdough.

After a couple of hours the “feet” were dry enough to be taken out of their moulds. The playdough is perfectly fine to re-use to make more casts – we reused ours 4 times and it was still good for more play.

We left or “feet” to dry out completely for a couple of days before painting and decorating them.

Now (perhaps slightly channelling Hans Solo given all the Star Wars stuff that is in the air at the moment), J’s feet are of on an adventure of their own…

Whilst making our footprints we listened to:

Other activities which might work well alongside reading Where My Feet Go include:

If you liked this post you might like these other posts by me:

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Disclosure: I was sent a free review copy of this book by the publisher.

Gentle cadences full of poetry and quiet snapshots of the waking world fill How the Sun Got to Coco’s House by Bob Graham, one of my very favourite of all books published last year.

It playfully follows the sun as dawn breaks in different locations around the globe, introducing readers to all sorts of children and their families and showing a moment in time that we all love to experience whatever our backgrounds and wherever we are in the world: the delight that the first rays of sunshine can bring – the warmth, the hope, the sense of adventure and optimism. Eventually the sunshine makes it to Coco’s home, presaging a day of joyous outdoor play with friends, leaving readers with a gentle and lovely glow of joy and delight in something so simple and universal.

Graham’s storytelling is full of tiny but magical moments – capturing the sun shining on a kid’s bicycle bell or making shadows in the snowy footprints of a young child. Lyrical and understated, you’ll appreciate the first rays of sun you see after reading this in a brand new light (if you’ll pardon the pun).

Whilst capturing the drama of beams of light when all around is dark has been brilliantly achieved by others (for example Klassen’s illustrations for Lemony Snicket’s The Dark), Graham dazzles with his sunbeams even when they are surrounded by brightness. Equally successful in bringing focus and intensity to vast landscapes as capturing the epitome of personal warmth felt in homes, between loved ones, Graham’s soft, pastel-hued illustrations really bring the world alive, helping us find wonder again in the everyday.

Having delighted in How the Sun Got to Coco’s House I gave my kids a slip of paper with the word ORRERY on it. Words are such fun, and this one is a real delight. The challenge was to find out what an orrery is, why it’s relevant to this book and then to build (a simple) one. This treasure hunt introduced us to:

Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery, possibly after Charles Jervas
oil on canvas, (1707)
NPG 894
© National Portrait Gallery, London

and to

“Graham portrait” by Unknown – http://cosmone.com/timepiece/agenda/look-graham-london-legacy. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graham_portrait.jpg#/media/File:Graham_portrait.jpg

and then eventually led us to this:

and finally to this:

Watch our play in action!

This small orrery shows the relative movement of the moon around the earth, and the earth around the sun, enabling me to explain to my girls how it is not that the sun actually moves around the earth (the descriptions of the sun’s movements in How the Sun Got to Coco’s House might lead listeners to think that this is the case). Rather, what’s happening is that the surface of the earth facing the sun changes as the earth rotates, giving the illusion of the sun moving around the earth.

Now I can’t claim any of the honours for this fabulous orrery. During our treasure hunt for information about orreries we discovered the inspirational videos created by the amazing Mr Newham who works at Ivydale Primary School in South London. In this video he shows how to make a simple orrery with very basic materials:

What’s even more brilliant is that Mr Newham sells kits to make these orreries (and many other brilliant D&T projects) and so we thought we’d give one a go. At £6 I don’t think I could have bought the materials cheaper myself and the service provided by Ivydale Science & Technology Service (Mr Newham’s shop front) was super swift and efficient.

I don’t normally recommend specific products of companies but I can’t resist doing so in this case because the kit and service was so good, and what’s more, the kits are available for entire classes, or individually for families at home. I’ve ordered a whole selection of kits now and so far every one of them has been a huge hit with my girls. So a big hurrah for Mr Newham and the way he’s facilitated my kids (and me!) getting excited about all sorts of aspects of science, design and technology!

Whilst making our orrery and space background (by running our fingers over toothbrushes covered in white paint) we listened to:

Other activities which would work well alongside reading How the Sun Got to Coco’s House include:

If you liked this post you might like these other posts by me:

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Disclosure: I was sent a free review copy of this book by the publisher.

This is the tale of Reg.

Reg, who loves to roar and gnash and stomp about.

He is, after all, a T-Rex.

Now ask any dino-mad four year old about a T-Rex’s favourite food and they’ll know: T-Rexes love their meat.

So what happens to poor Reg when it turns out he loves…. veg? Will his dino friends still accept him as one of their own? Will Reg be brave enough to be true to himself?

T-Veg: The Tale of a Carrot Crunching Dinosaur written by Smriti Prasadam-Halls and illustrated by Katherina Manolessou is a vitality packed, vibrantly illustrated tale about breaking the mould and learning to embrace difference. From the zest and zing of Manolessou’s bold and almost day-glow dinosaurs, to the bounce and energy-packed rhymes of Prasadam-Halls, this is the picture book equivalent of a super healthy, organic, freshly-pressed and delicious smoothie. As if packed with key vitamins and minerals it will lift your mood and put a spring in your step!

The book’s recipe mixes:

All are combined to serve up an extremely tasty treat whatever your preferred diet!

Taking our lead from Manolessou’s exciting illustrations I prepared some dino stencils: You can print off and then cut out a Triceratops stencil, T-rex stencil, a corythosaurus stencil and one more dinosaur stencil if you want to try this at home.

Using masking tape, a few sponges and some day-glow paint the girls stencilled a variety of dinos.

Once the paint was dry, they printed dino skin patterns, using small blocks of wood covered in bubble wrap.

Next up the girls painting a lush dino-landscape…

…before finally inhabiting it with their cut-out dinos:

Whilst printing and painting our dinos we listened to:

Other activities which might work well alongside reading this book include:

If you liked this post you might like these other posts by me:

Creating a dinosaur landscape complete with an erupting volcano!

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Disclosure: I was sent a free review copy of this book by the publisher.

With Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman out next month after a 55 year wait, gaps between (the publication of) sequels are the talk of the town. After all, we readers all love it when a great book has a sequel that we can dive into, sparing us the loss of having to leave a new world behind, allowing us to continue being part of a landscape we’ve fallen in love with.

Some gaps between children’s books and their sequels are very large indeed: There were more than 50 years between Heidi and the first publication of Heidi Grows Up, in excess of 90 years between Peter and Wendy and Peter Pan in Scarlet, and 102 years between Five Children and It and Five Children on the Western Front.

But hang on – in each of these cases these sequels were written after the original author had died.

What about story arcs which have been returned to by the original author after a considerable period of time? 18 years went by between the publication of the third and forth volumes of Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea series (The Farthest Shore in 1972 and Tehanu in 1990). 23 years after Richard Adams penned Watership Down (1972), he returned with Tales from Watership Down (1996). Alan Garner finally completed his Weirdstone trilogy with Boneland almost 50 years after the second book in the series, The Moon of Gomrath (1963).

It’s not just novels which are sometimes returned to after a long gap. There are several cases where picture book sequels have appear a considerable time after a first book about a given character. There were 9 years between the debut Winnie the Witch (by Valerie Thomas and Korky Paul) and Winnie in Winter (1996). Despite a slow start, there are now 15 books in the series!

There was an even longer passage of time between the first Elmer book by David McKee and the second outing for Elmer although they weren’t quite sequels; Elmer was first published in 1968 and 21 years later a re-written, re-illustrated version came out with a different publisher (Andersen), essentially as a new book. More easily identified as sequels, Chris Van Allsburg’s Jumanji and Zathura were also published 21 years apart.

But the longest gap I can find in the world of picture books, when it comes to time elapsed before a sequel appeared, is 47 years. Rosie’s Walk by Pat Hutchins first appearing in 1968. It’s been 47 years in the coming, but this year finally saw its sequel hit bookshelves, in the form of Where, Oh Where, is Rosie’s chick?

When we first met Rosie the Chicken we delighted as she walked about her farm, managing to avoid being captured by a wiley fox. Was she really entirely oblivious to the vulpine threat as she strutted about? Was the fox simply so stupid he only had himself to blame for his downfall? Great fun is had by the two stories running in parallel and yet intricately entwined. It’s a super joke – the fox isn’t ever explicitly mentioned, and yet without the fox there would be no story.

Fast forward nearly half a century and we meet Rosie just as her chick is hatching. Just as the chick tries to leave the nest, Rosie loses her little one. She searches high and low whilst the little chick faces threats from cats and fish and… yes, foxes, each time being saved serendipitously, by the un-knowing actions of her mum. It’s a funny read, with elements of slapstick, rounded off with reassurance (even the foxes appear only to have been playing family hide and seek), faithfully echoing the original palette and style of artwork. A little bit of nostalgia helps carry the the visual and written stories; the sequel’s ending doesn’t have quite the wicked joy of the original, but can nevertheless be enjoyed both those new to Rosie, and by old friends.

Inspired by Hutchins distinctive art we tried our had at making landscapes through which Rosie and her chick could wander. First we painted swathes and patches of various shades of green and yellow. Once these patches were dry we use leaf and fruit shaped stamps made from modelling clay (plasticine) to created repeated motifs on top of our blocks of colour. Once leaves and fruit were dry we went round the contours with a black permanent pen.

Hutchins herself creates her art in quite a different way creating the line drawings first and adding colour afterwards, but even so, our end results mirrored her landscapes rather pleasingly.

One of the lovely things about returning to Rosie years after I first met her is in the opportunity the sequel gives to reflect on how my life has changed since I first read Rosie’s Walk as a child, and years later shared it as a parent myself. There’s something very comforting about now having the story of Rosie’s chick to giggle over together with my own children. It’s a treat I suspect many parents and children, or even grandparents and grandchildren will enjoy.

But what about you? What sequels have you eagerly waited for? And what sequels (real or only dreamed of) are you or your children still waiting for?

My thanks go to Lisa Davies, Liz Cross and Clare Helen Walsh, Emma Layfield, Libby Hamilton and Ellen Duthie for help with some of the research for this post.

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of Where, Oh Where, is Rosie’s Chick? from the publisher.

Every evening for the past couple of weeks I’ve had an appointment in the Kingdom of Silk.

The Kingdom of Silk is a small patch of ground on the outskirts of a small Australian town. It’s remarkable for the wealth of love and creativity, the depth of compassion and brightness of sincerity you can find there. It’s a place full of peals of laughter, although visiting it is also known to squeeze gentle tears from your heart.

This magical location may sound vaguely familiar to you: It’s the setting of a series of short novels by Glenda Millard, the first of which I reviewed earlier this year. It’s not often I return to the same book on my blog (indeed re-reading more generally is something I rarely do, knowing that time is always too short and the worlds to be explored between the pages of a book are ever expanding) but back in February when I first entreated you to find a copy of The Naming of Tishkin Silk, I had only shared one of the series with my children, and I was curious to witness how they would take to the honest, unpatronising, sometimes heartbreaking exploration of emotionally complex issues that continues across the entire series of Kingdom of Silk books. After all, fostering, dementia, refugees and world peace are not your everyday, run-of-the-mill themes for books for children.

These books (illustrated by Caroline Magerl and Stephen Michael King) have been our end-of-day bedtime delight for about a month now. I’ve been reading them to both M (10) and J (7) at the same time. We’re almost finished The Tender Moments of Saffron Silk, and September, when the last book in the series (Nell’s Festival of Crisp Winter Glories) is due to be published, now seems unbearably far away.

I’m sharing all this with you because these evening visits to the Kingdom of Silk have been so quietly beautiful as a shared family reading experience that I’d love for you to be able to experience them too. Sharing the stories of the Silk family and how they face up to the challenges family life throws at them and seeing how they respond generously and kindly to problems faced by people they love has brought so many “tender moments” to our own family. It’s brought magic into our lives as the stories have made us see creative, enchanted opportunities where we didn’t see any before. This magic is pin perfectly described in Plum Puddings and Paper Moons, the 5th book in the series:

‘We’re all born with magic in us,’ she said. ‘A child’s magic is so powerful it sometimes rubs off on grown-up people. When that happens, they rediscover their own leftover magic and all kinds of remarkable things happen. Their limpy legs grow stronger and they don’t need as many naps. The words of long-forgotten songs and stories come back into their heads. Sometimes they compose completely new tunes and whistle them on red buses in the mornings when they’re going to the library to borrow books about interesting topics like magic puddings or very hungry caterpillars. And on cold, dark, dismal days they see fired-breathing dragons and knights in shining armour, where once they saw only clouds. People like this laugh loudly and often, and they smile more, because they’ve discovered the marvellous secret that leftover magic is a cure for gloominess and loneliness[.]”

The Silk Family have a wonderful institution: The OCCASION Breakfast. Each Saturday morning, a member of the family prepares a themed breakfast over which everyone lingers. This weekend M and J insisted on our first OCCASION Breakfast, which they themed around the colours of orange, yellow and red, honouring the Silk children Amber, Scarlet and Saffron.

Breakfast isn’t the only time food brings people together causing outbreaks of smiles and laughter. Cakes feature in every volume of the Kingdom of Silk. There’s a lovely passage (also in Plum Puddings and Paper Moons) about how the gift of a cake can quietly speak volumes. Ever so keen to try out the recipe for Amber’s Armenian Love Cake which Millard supplies, we’ve been baking them, gobbling them and giving them to friends.

Amber’s Armenian Love Cakes – wonderfully nutmeg-y light cakes with a biscuity base

Whilst I love cakes, if I had to choose between them and books, I’d have to forgo the sweet treats. And why? This short passage, from the sixth book in the series, The Tender Moments of Saffron Silk, nails it:

On the bottom tier was a small cut-glass dish of sugar-coated aniseed rings, a plate of pink jelly cakes and a tattered copy of Anne of Green Gables.

It was Nell’s book. She’d had it since she was a young girl and had learnt a lot about being a better person by reading it, even though it was a mostly made-up story. From the moment her daughters were born, Nell read to them. it didn’t matter that they didn’t understand the words. books are many things: lullabies for the wary, ointment for the wounded, armour for the fearful and nests for those in need of a home.”

The Kingdom of Silk books are music to entrance and transport you, balm for bruised souls, practical tools for fostering empathy, and the most comforting, comfortable refuge at the ends of busy days. Lots of books come to life in our home but having seen how my daughters have taken these stories deep into their hearts and lives, their play and conversation, I wouldn’t be surprised if in forty years time it is these ones which my children remember most happily when asked to think of their favourite books of all time.

Packed with perky Dr Seuss-esque rhyme, Spots by Helen Ward (Spots in a Box in the US) is a very funny exploration of one guinea fowl’s quest for his missing spots.

His plumage is not like the others so he sends off for dotty supplies: he wants to fit in by matching his friends. Boxes of all sorts arrive, filled with spots of different colour and size, but will any of them be spot on and what he thought he needed?

This is an amazingly illustrated, stunningly produced book about how one guinea fowl’s quest to be like all the others leads him to discover that we don’t all need to be the same to get along; smiles, not colour of spots, is what brings us together.

Helen Ward’s text is a delight to read aloud, full of bouncing, lively word play. Her illustrations, detailed and finely painted, zing off uncluttered white backgrounds, giving them a real sense of impact with each page turn. Not only beautiful to look at, they are also funny! From the guinea fowl with a box on his head to his dancing as he wears silvery, sparkly spots, there’s something reminiscent of the great black and white comedy heroes like Laurel and Hardy or Buster Keaton in the bird’s characterisation.

With die cut holes, foil and sparkle, this book has been produced with great attention to detail. The pages are such that you will want to explore them with your fingers as well as eyes as you read or listen (there’s even a spread where you’ll want to get out your pencils and make your own mark – the illustration will lure you in).

Humorous and inventive, with a subtle message about diversity and finding out who you are, Spots is a prize-worthy picture book.

We decided to create our own flock of guinea fowl each with their own style of spots. I created a guinea fowl silhouette which we printed and cut out – you can do exactly the same by downloading this left-facing fowl and this right-facing one (in pdf format).

We then let ourselves loose with spotty and dotty ideas, mixing stickers with printing (corks and lids), using the hole puncher to create mini dots to glue on, ink splats, collage circles, buttons, sequins – anything went as long as it was spotty or dotty.

All in all this made for a rather grand flock – imagine how well this could work in a classroom or group setting?!

Whilst decorating our guinea fowl we listened to:

Other activities which would go well with Spots include:

Do you go in more for spots or stripes? What are your favourite picture books about either?

Disclosure: I was sent a free review copy of this book by the publisher.

“Griffin came into the Silk family after Scarlet, Indigo, Violet, Amber and Saffron. He came early in the morning on that uncommon day, the twenty-ninth of February. His father’s prediction, considering the date of Griffin’s birth, was that he would be an uncommon sort of boy.

Perhaps he was, thought Griffin ruefully. For the first time in his life, he wished he’d been born on the twenty-eighth day of February or even the first of March. Maybe then he would have been an ordinary boy instead. If he were an ordinary boy, maybe Mama wouldn’t have gone away. Maybe his secret thoughts wouldn’t have changed everything.

With these words The Naming of Tishkin Silk by Glenda Millard starts weaving gentle magic around your unsuspecting heart.

Griffin is a member of the somewhat unusual and perhaps slightly bohemian Silk family, who live on the outskirts of a small Australian town. Griffin carries a secret deep inside him, a huge worry that he finds hard to share until he meets Layla, instantly recognisable to him as a princess because she is wearing a daisy-chain crown. Thanks to the thoughtfulness shown by his new friend, Griffin’s courage grows and together they do something that heals the sorrow which all the family has felt after a terrible event no-one has been able to talk about for months.

Just like Griffin, this is a truly “uncommon” short novel, the first in a seven part series. From unexpected characters to profoundly moving themes threaded together with sometimes astonishingly lyrical writing, this book is something utterly different and incredibly beautiful. I have never before come across such delicate and yet powerful writing in a novel for children. Unique, breathtaking and full of fierce love and deep sorrow, The Naming of Tishkin Silk is the sort of book that changes you forever, the sort of book you are just so glad to have inside you, to enrich even the happiest of days and to sustain you on dark nights.

The dual aspect of this novel – intense sadness and intense happiness – reminded me of a passage in The Prophet by Khalil Gibran about joy and sorrow; “the deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.“. Whilst this book deals with some of the most difficult themes you’re likely to come across in books for its target age range (approximately 8-12), Millard does it with such quiet tenderness that it doesn’t overwhelm. Indeed, like the adult characters inside the book, Millard enters the world children inhabit without patronising them, but rather with immense respect, sincerity and creativity.

The stories we tell ourselves in an attempt to make sense of the world around us, adjusting to different family setups when new babies are born, sibling jealousy, and the value of having space and taking time to think form some of the varied threads woven throughout this precious book. Never once soppy or sentimental, Millard writes with honesty and integrity about deep and loving emotions. This is a tremendous book for exploring kindness and empathy.

It’s Australian setting is lightly but evocatively worn, grounding the somewhat enchanted story in a very real time and place. Yes, my praise for this book goes on and on! And yet, when this book first arrived in my home, I shelved it in a dusty corner. I judged the book by its cover, and the cover did not work for me at all (Caroline Magerl illustrated this first book in the series, but subsequent volumes have been illustrated by Stephen Michael King). It looked airy-fairy, hippy-dippy, saccharine and syrupy and not like something I would enjoy. Someone whose judgement I trust, however, kept telling me I should read the book. Pig-headedly, I kept ignoring this advice. But what a fool I was! Tishkin could have been part of me for two whole extra years if I had listened and not let my prejudices sway me.

For once I had read the book, I was utterly smitten. I could not get hold of the rest of the series quickly enough.

If, however, I still had a niggling doubt, it was about how children would respond to these books. Subtle and yet emotionally complex, featuring an unusual family, and dealing with issues as varied as death, illness, fostering, immigration and dementia over the course of the books now available in the UK (the 6th title in the series, The Tender Moments of Saffron Silk, is published next week on World Book Day, and the final will be available in September this year), I was very curious as to how young people, rather than adults would respond to these books.

I only have one child’s response to call upon, but M, my ten year old, has taken these stories to her heart as much as I have. She’s read each one in a single sitting, and whilst she agrees they are indeed full of sadness, they are also “really funny and playful”, “just the sort of family I want ours to be like”. She has SO many plans for implementing aspects of these stories into our lives, from making the recipes which feature throughout the series, to adopting the special breakfast rituals the Silk Family has into our own home, from making our own paper to consecrating an apple tree for tea parties, from collecting shiny foil to painting special poems on walls and doors. I think I shall be posting our activities, our Kingdom of silk playing by the book for a long time to come on the blog!

As it is, we’ve already got our own green rubber gloves with red nail polish…

…we’ve painted our toes like Layla…

… and we’ve started having hummingbird nectar and fairy bread when we come in from school.

Layla and Griffin and all the Kingdom of Silk clan are now part of our lives: We are all the richer for them. These books are alive with wonder and warmth and they’re some of the best I think my family has ever shared.

In the closing pages of The Naming of Tishkin Silk , this gently heart wrenching, heart-soaring short novel, Millard writes, “There are some days when heaven seems much closer to earth than others, and Friday the twenty-seventh of February was one of them.” By introducing you to this book today, also a Friday the twenty-seventh of February, I’ve tried to offer you a slice of such beauty, kindness and wonder as will indeed make today (or at least the day you start reading your own copy of The Naming of Tishkin Silk ) one of those days where heaven really does seem a little nearer by.

Photo: Tonya Staab

Are you ever too old for a picture book?

Walk into a bookshop, and you’ll rarely find a picture book on the shelves labelled 5-8, 9-12 or Teenage/Young Adult (the age bandings used in the most widespread chain of bookshops in the UK), implicitly telling buyers that picture books are only for those under 5.

But what if you have a picture book about Descartes’s philosophical statement “Je pense donc je suis” or to put it another way “Cogito Ergo Sum”?

A book which not only explores learning to listen to yourself, to trust your own instincts but also what it feels like when you think you have failed and how to fight against the dark thoughts that then crowd in.

Gosh, if only we all knew everything we needed to know about these issues by the time we were five! Wouldn’t life be much simpler?

I am Henry Finch written by Alexis Deacon and illustrated by Viviane Schwarz is a new picture book which makes readers and listeners think about every one of these big concepts and more. It’s about being brave, about being independent, about feeling secure enough to not follow the crowd (though also being happy to be part of a community).

It’s also about totally adorable little birds and one terribly monstrous beast who wants to eat them all up.

Henry is just one of a huge flock of finches. They make a racket all day long, doing the same as each other over and again but one day Henry starts thinking for himself. He starts to have his own dreams, his own vision of who he could be, independent from the community he’s grown up in.

Alexis Deacon has written (although not specifically about Henry Finch):

“It seems to me that if every character in your story is entirely on message and engaged with the world you have created it can be very off-putting for the reader. I find that I am drawn to stories where not every character follows the grain: Reluctant characters, perverse characters, selfish characters, irreverent characters. They are often the catalysts for action too.”

And Henry Finch does indeed go against the grain, doing things differently to those around him, daring to be different. But he’s not selfish. In fact, his ability to think for himself gives him the courage to tackle the monster who threatens his family and friends.

Danger, doubt and darkness beset Henry, but he survives and shares what he has learned with his fellow finches, sparking a cascade of individual ideas and wishes as they each set off to explore the world, though not before reassuring each other that “We will come back“; the finches are thinking for themselves, but individuality doesn’t have to lead to the destruction of their community.

Deacon’s story is full of food for thought, opportunities for discussion and debate, whether you’re 4 or 40 or more. The meaty issues explored never become overwhelming, not least because Viviane Schwarz’s illustrations bring so much humour, delight and simplicity into the story.

The use of fingerprints to illustrate a narrative about what it means to be an individual is a stroke of genius; is there a more powerful symbol of individual human identity than the imprint left by the small ridges on the tips of our fingers? They also bring massive child appeal; mucky fingerprints on walls and furniture are unavoidable aspects of life with children, and so there is nothing like these marks to proudly proclaim, “Hey, I’m here, me, this child, and I can make a mark on the world around me!”.

I really like how Schwarz sometimes brings her real life community into her artwork. In her graphic novel The Sleepwalkers there are crowd scenes filled with real people she knows, and in I am Henry Finch, she’s included fingerprints from friends as well as her own. The joy she’s had in creating these images can be seen in the hugely expressive faces and wings of the finches, and that seeped into us: we just had to make our own flock of finches using the same technique.

We started out with inkpads, paper and lots of messy fingerprints…

…but soon we were experimenting with other sorts of prints too…

Then we added beaks and wings…

And soon we had our very own chattering of finches:

One or two elephants interloped! (these were made from prints using the side of our fists – click here to see what Viv Schwarz created with similar prints)

These finches were born from toe-prints, whilst the beasts were heel-prints:

They just kept on coming, causing havoc, and just getting on with doing their own thing.

Whilst fingerprinting and making our own flock of birds we listened to:

Other activities which could work well alongside reading I am Henry Finch include:

I’ve more philosophy in the form of illustrated books coming up soon on the blog, with offerings from the Netherlands and Spain. What are your favourite picture books which deal with the big issues in life?

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of I am Henry Finch from the publishers.

Yesterday’s events in Paris at the offices of Charlie Hebdo were terrible (the word seems rather pathetic as I type it), and today’s post is my (somewhat insignificant but personally important) way of standing up for freedom of expression.

Rather than responding with derisive ridicule I feel that a response where we make efforts to better understand those we portray as enemies and those we simply don’t know would be much more constructive. Although humour has a place in helping us deal with the shock and horror of it all, laughing in the faces of those who acted yesterday isn’t going to stop this sort of thing happening again. Building understanding and reaching out might.

To that end, here’s a list of books for children and teenagers which might help spread understanding of what life can be like for Muslims living in the west. I haven’t read them all, but where possible I’ve indicated the (approximate) target age group. If you’ve further suggestions to make please leave them in the comments to this post.

Big Red Lollipop by Rukhsana Khan (3+)
My Own Special Way by Mithaa Alkhayyat, retold by Vivian French, translated by Fatima Sharafeddini (5+)
The Perfect Flower Girl by Taghred Chandab and Binny Talib (5+)
Mohammed’s Journey: A Refugee Diary by Anthony Robinson and Annemarie Young, illustrated by June Allen (7+)
Dahling if you Luv Me Would You Please Please Smile? by Rukhsana Khan (10+)
An Act of Love by Alan Gibbons (10+)
Mixing It by Rosemary Hayes (10+)
Head over Heart by Colette Victor (10+)
Dear Blue Sky by Mary Sullivan
Mind set written by Joanna Kenrick, illustrated by Julia Page (12+)
My Sister lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher (12+)
Drawing a veil by Lari Don (12+)
She Wore Red Trainers by Na’ima B. Robert (teenage)
Does My Head Look Big in This? by Randa Abdel-Fattah (teenage)
Persepolis (especially book 2) by Marjane Satrapi (15+)

With the rise of Pegida in Germany, and the continued anti-immigration, anti-Muslim commentary that fills much political “debate” around the world it seems more urgent than ever to me that we find ways of talking about multicultural life, its richness and challenges. I’d also like to see more exploration why people commit acts of terror in books for children and young people. Over Christmas I read Palestine by Joe Sacco, a graphic novel aimed at adults about life in Palestine. It was utterly depressing but essential reading, and I wish more of this sort of thing, which looks at injustice, conflict (and the West’s role in this) were available for children and young people.

As several of those murdered yesterday were cartoonists, lots of illustrators have responded how they know best. Here are some cartoons created by children’s illustrators:

Response from Chris Riddell. “I am Charlie”.

Art Spiegelman and Oliver Jeffers hold the eyes of Cabu, one of the cartoonists murdered in Paris.

Tomi Ungerer’s response. “There’s no freedom without press freedom”

Response from Stephanie Blake. “Mum, who’s Charlie Hebdo? It’s Freedom, Simon.”

Response from Benjamin Lacombe: “One can cut off heads, but not ideas”

A response by @TheMagnusShaw rather than Charles M. Schulz, but referencing of course Charlie Brown, “I am Charlie”.

A response from Albert Uderzo (shared by Wolfgang Luef)

My thanks go to Farah Mendlesohn, Rukshana Khan, Anabel Marsh, Marion, Melanie McGilloway, Melinda Ingram, Janice Morris and Alexandra Strick for their suggestions. I’m left thinking today especially of my French bookish friends Melanie and Sophie, and the families of everyone involved in yesterday’s events.

Is there a better way to start the new year than by introducing you to a book which will take you somewhere you’ve likely not visited via picture books before, is illustrated by the first Asian recipient of the most prestigious awards in children’s literature, the Hans Christian Andersen Award, and is about to be published for the first time in the UK with its original illustrations?

The Little Black Fish written by Samad Behrangi, translated by Azita Rassi and illustrated by Farshid Mesghali is perhaps the most famous children’s book of all time back in its home country, Iran.

As anyone who’s spent time with children knows, the littlest people can ask the biggest questions, and so it is with the little black fish in this story who wants to find out more about life outside of the pool where he and his family have always lived. Just because the family have always lived a certain way, why shouldn’t this brave and curious fish extend his horizons and set out to explore beyond his known world?

As the fish travels downstream he sees incredible sights the like of which he could never before have imagined. He also faces some terrible dangers. Will the fish survive to see his dream – the wide open ocean? Will his story of inquisitiveness and desire for freedom inspire others?

Behrangi’s story took on great political significance in Iran after it was published, read by many adults as a political allegory (you can find out more here). Indeed the message was so powerful, the book was banned in pre-revolutionary Iran. Whilst this historical background gives the book an additional charge for adults, younger readers in 2015 can enjoy this short story as an encouraging tale about believing in oneself, about learning from personal experience, and about not being afraid to be different.

The Little Black Fish won the First Graphic Prize at Sixth International Children Books’ Fair (1968) in Bologna for its illustrations by Farshid Mesghali. The stylish bold textured prints in a limited range of colours are beautifully reproduced and bound in this smart edition from Tiny Owl Publishing. Their apparent simplicity suggests something both childlike and timeless.

Inspired by the style of illustrations in The Little Black Fish we set about creating fish prints using plasticine (oil based, non permanent modelling clay). This was a great activity for giving old and manky plasticine one last shot at life!

We squished together lots of old pieces, and created “blanks” of different sizes. These blanks were turned into fish shapes using scissors to cut them, and then decorated with impressions made using butter (blunt) knives, forks and sharpened pencils.

Top tips for printing with plasticine

Once our prints were made we worked on some net-themed frames for them, making use of some of the cardboard collected over the Christmas parcel and present season. Here’s a short animated tutorial I made to show you how we did it:

Here are some of our finished and framed prints of fish exploring the wider world!

Whilst weaving and printing we listened to:

Other activities which would go well with reading The Little Black Fish include:

I’m delighted that Tiny Owl Publishing will be bringing us more translated Iranian children’s books in the coming months (although I do hope that future books will fully credit the illustrator and translator on the front cover of books, not just inside). What other unsung heroes in the international picture book world would you recommend I look out for – authors and illustrators who are famous in their home countries but who haven’t had wide recognition in the English speaking world?

Finally, you might notice things look a little different on the blog today. Over Christmas I updated the blog so that it should now be fully mobile-platform friendly; if you want to view this blog on your phone or tablet it should now be much easier to navigate and more pleasant to look at as the text and images are fully scalable. I’ll also take this opportunity to highlight Playing by the book can be found on twitter @playbythebook, Facebook, Pinterest and even (in a very small way) on Youtube – please feel free to follow me wherever it suits you.

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of The Little Black Fish from the publisher.

I believe any book can fuel the imagination when it arrives in the right hands at the right time, but there are also some which explicitly explore how we nurture creativity and create space for inspiration and following our dreams. The Wonder by Faye Hanson and The Imaginary by A.F. Harrold and Emily Gravett are two such books which I’ve read recently and which have left me brimming with delight, hope and happiness and which have sparked hours of inspired play in my children.

The Wonder by Faye Hanson is a sumptuous début picture book about a young boy whose head if full of daydreams which transform the humdrum world around him. Time and again adults tell him to get his head out of the clouds and come back to reality, but this is barely possible for a child who finds wonder, curiosity and delight wherever he looks. Finally in art class he’s able to let loose his imagination onto a blank sheet of paper delighting his teacher and filling his parents with pride.

The child in this story sees ordinary objects but has the imagination to turn them into astonishing stories, breathtaking ideas, and worlds full of adventures waiting to happen. I know I want to foster this ability in my own children (and in myself!); the world becomes more beautiful, richer, and simply more enjoyable when we are able to imagine more than the grey, wet and humdrum daily life that all too often catches us up. This utterly delightful book is an enthusiastic encouragement to let more imagination in to our lives.

Click to view a larger version (it’s really worth it!) of this interior spread from The Wonder by Faye Hanson

Hanson’s illustrations are dense, saturated, and rich. Careful use of colour lights up the boy’s dreams in his otherwise sepia coloured life. Limited palettes add to the intensity of these pictures; it’s interesting that their vitality doesn’t come from a rainbow range of paints, but rather from focussing on layer of layer of just a few colours, packed with exquisite detail. There’s a luminosity about the illustrations; some look like they’ve got gold foil or a built-in glow and yet there are no novelty printing techniques here.

All in all, an exquisite book that will tell anyone you share it with that you value their dreams and want to nurture their ingenuity, inventiveness and individuality.

Now let me play devil’s advocate: Is there sometimes a line to be walked between feeding a child’s imagination and yet enabling them to recognise the difference between real life and day dreams? In The Wonder, there are plenty of adults pointing out the apparent problems/risks of day dreaming a great deal. On the other hand, in The Imaginary, a mother fully enters into her daughter’s imaginary world, not only acknowledging an imaginary best friend, but actively supporting this belief by setting places at meal times, packing extra bags, even accepting accidents must be the result of this friend and not the child herself.

Amanda believes that only she can see her imaginary friend Rudger. But all this changes one day when a mysterious Mr Bunting appears on the doorstep, apparently doing innocent door-to-door market research. But all is not as it seems for it turns out that Mr Bunting has no imagination of his own and can only survive by eating other people’s imaginary friends. He’s sniffed Rudger out and now he’s going to get him, whatever it takes.

Click to see larger illustration by Emily Gravett, from The Imaginary by A. F. Harrold

If you’ve ever wondered where imaginary friends come from, and what happens to them when their children grow up and stop day-dreaming this is a book for you. If you love a good villain, adventures which include libraries and narrow escapes you’ll enjoy this too. If you’re a fan of elegant and attractive books you’ll want to feel this between your hands. The illustrations by Emily Gravett are terrific (in every sense) and incredibly atmospheric, magically adding beauty and tension to a story which I thought couldn’t be bettered.

Intelligent, clever, thoughtful, and packed with seeds of love and inspiration The Imaginary is perhaps my favourite middle grade/young fiction book of the year. If you want a fuller flavour of this gem before hurrying to get it into your hands, head and heart, there’s a full teacher’s guide to The Imaginary available on the Bloomsbury website and you can watch a video of Emily Gravett working on her illustrations here.

One of the ways my girls have been inspired in their playing since sharing these books became clear when they told me they wanted to make a star-making machine to go with the one features in The Wonder (see the illustration above).

M first wrote out some recipes for stars:

I provided a little food for thought…

…and a selection of machine parts.

Several hours later the star machine was coming together

Next up a selection of star ingredients were sourced:

The machine was fed…

Can you see the pulses of one star in the making?!

And out popped these stars (here’s a tutorial) at the end of the star making process:

Here’s one just for you:

Whilst making our machine we listened to:

Other activities which could work well alongside reading The Wonder and The Imaginary include:

How do you foster your kids’ imagination? And your own?

Disclosure: I was sent free review copies of both books in today’s post.

I do love a book full of holes.

Tights with holes? No thank you.

A bike tyre with a hole? What a pain.

But a book with holes? Yes PLEASE!

There are some all-time classic books with holes in them: Carle’s Very Hungry Caterpillar and the Ahlbergs’ Peepo. More recently there’s the exuberant Peck, Peck, Peck by Lucy Cousins, which I adore. But a new contender to join the ranks of honourably holey hits is It’s an Orange Aardvark! by Michael Hall.

The tale of a small colony of carpenter ants chewing holes in a tree stump, this book covers everything from learning about colours and similes to group dynamics and animal biology. It’s a wonderfully enjoyable read which explores both curiosity and fear. It really packs a great deal within its covers at the same time as being a visual and tactile treat.

A band of formic brothers are creating holes in their stump to look out on the world outside their home. One is enthusiastic to see what lies beyond their threshold. Another is terribly worried about the dangers that lurk beyond their known and safe world. As they make each window their stump is flooded with colour. What could be the cause of this? Is it something to embrace and delight in or could it be a threat?

The naysayer is convinced there is an existential threat to them all in the form of an aardvark waiting to gobble them up. As each different colour floods the stump, this poor ant must come up with increasingly outrageous explanations; could it really be a (blue) pyjama-wearing, (red) ketchup carrying, orange aardvark guiding a group of green geckos?

With a hint of Klassen-style ambiguity in the ending (what really was the source of all the colour?) this book is full of delicious tension, punctured with lots of humour as well as holes which let the colour flood from one page to the next. The bold illustrations appear to be made from collage, mixing watercolour and tissue paper. The torn edges suggesting the tree stump sides give an additional handmade, personal feel to the images, and the use of black and grey pages ensures the colours sing and pulse as they shine through.

The somewhat American language (“Sweet!”, “Neat!”) may niggle some readers elsewhere in the world but this is a small price to pay for such an inventive, enjoyable read. I do hope it will be released as a board book so that it can be fully explored with the fingers, hands and mouths not just of aardvarks but also of the youngest book devourers.

Taking the lead from the concentric rings of colour flooding through each hole as it is created in the tree stump, we used tissue paper circles of various sizes to create suncatchers which explored colour depth. You can buy ready cut shapes of tissue paper, but we used regular sheets and cut out a series of circles of various sizes using plates, bowls and mugs as our templates.

We layered our circles over a sheet of contact paper large enough to then fold back over the concentric circles to enclose them entirely in see-through plastic. An alternative would have been to use laminator sheets, if you have ones which are larger enough for your largest circle.

Once a we had a selection of coloured tissue paper/contact paper circle sandwiches we stuck them on our patio doors and let the light flood through them.

Whilst making our concentric sun catchers we listened to:

Other activities which would go well with reading It’s an Orange Aardvark! include:

What’s your favourite book with holes in it? What’s the most annoying (non book) hole you’ve ever discovered?

Disclosure: I was sent a review copy of this book by the publisher.

Sam & Dave Dig a Hole by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Jon Klassen is full of near misses but ends up being one big hit. Forget the treasure that may or may not be buried under your feet, pick this book up and you’ll have a real gem in your hands.

It starts like this:

Apropos of seemingly nothing, Sam and Dave decide to dig a hole.

They’re only going to stop when they find “something spectacular”.

They don’t have much luck, but… in a brilliantly crafted piece of drama they come oh so painfully, excruciatingly close.

Many picture book creators have talked about how they see their books as mini pieces of theatre, and this book delivers a very special theatrical experience; like in a pantomime when you might call out “He’s behind you!”, only for the innocent character on stage to turn and see nothing, the reader/listener has special knowledge that poor Sam and Dave do not. With beautifully textured, muted illustrations revealing something quite different to what is known from the text, children treated to this story get a special thrill from “being in the know”, from seeing the truly spectacular buried treasure that the poor protagonists keep missing.

This empowering experience is doubled up through association with Sam and Dave’s little dog. Despite being small and just a side kick (like many children sometimes feel), the dog seems to have all the brains. He is the one who keeps sensing just how close the diamonds are. He is the one who makes the breakthrough, resulting in Sam and Dave appearing to have dug all the way through to …

…well, to what? To where? Although this book was authored by Barnett, the ending feels like classic Klassen: It’s full of ambiguity and multiple possible readings. Have Sam and Dave dug all the way through from one side of the earth to the other? Have they managed through some Möbius-strip-like convolution to dig all the way through to end up back where they started? Or have they discovered something genuinely spectacular – some new dimension where slightly different rules are at play?

Finely honed, pared-back text and seemingly quiet illustrations which actually pack a very funny punch combine to make this a winner. Do look out for Sam & Dave Dig a Hole!

Inspired by Sam and Dave’s digging we decided to do a little bit of digging ourselves. Using these guidelines from Suffolk County Council, we dug what is known by archaeologists as a “test pit” in the middle of the lawn in our back garden.

We marked out a square and I took off the top layer of turf before the girls started digging down, retrieving any “treasure” they found on the way.

They used a large garden sieve to go through the soil they removed, and a toothbrush to wash what they found.

As you can see we found quite a lot of “treasure” including something metal but unidentifiable (top left of the photo below), a section of Victorian clay pipe stem, several pieces of pottery and a surprising number of large bones! (oh, and a hippo…..)

At some point when my back was turned the game developed into something a little different – M made a “time capsule” in an old icecream tub and insisted that it got buried when the time came to fill in our hole.

So I guess this means we’ll be digging another hole at some point in the future. Given how much fun we had with this one, I won’t be complaining.

We weren’t listening to music whilst we dug our hole, but were we to choose some music to match Sam & Dave Dig a Hole we might include these in our playlist:

Other activities you could enjoy along side reading this hilarious book include:

What’s your favourite hole? A hole you made? A hole you visited? A hole which allows you to sneak through into some secret space?

Disclosure: I was sent a free review copy of this book from the publisher but was under no obligation to review it and received no payment for doing so.

Fascinating and reassuring, thoughtful and funny, Welcome to the Family by Mary Hoffman, illustrated by Ros Asquith is a very special book about all sorts of different families and the ways children end up in them. If ever a book was cut and bound with love, this is it.

It’s the perfect book if you’re part of a family with step-parents, adopted siblings, or any sort of family which is not vanilla Mum, Dad and 2.4 kids, and you want your family to see families just like yours in between the pages of a book.

It’s also the perfect book if you are part of a family with Mum, Dad and 2.4 kids and you want to help your kids understand that there’s not just one way of being a family, even if all families do have one very important thing in common: Love.

All sorts of children (and parents) will find themselves in this book; they will see themselves and their family set-ups acknowledged and celebrated without judgement. And as is appropriate of any celebration there’s lots of joy, happiness and humour in both words and pictures. Reassurance that the child is loved and welcomed is the beating heart of this book.

A special cuddly teddy bear provides commentary at different points in the text, allowing children to feel ok if what they’re reading is new or surprising for them. Sibling rivalry, anxiety and the difficulties which can arise in any family are also mentioned; this remains a realistic, not a sugar-coated view of family life, and it’s all the more comforting for that.

Whilst I adore this book more than I have found easy to say (I’ve drafted this review many times trying to find just mix of exuberance and professionalism), I think it worth pointing out that although all sorts of families are included, they are all core, nuclear families ie parents and children. No explicit mention is made of aunts and uncles, grandparents or cousins, and yet these people too are very important parts of many families.

Sharing this book (or letting your child discover it for themselves) is an easy and enjoyable way to introduce your primary school aged kids to everything from IVF babies to the fact that some kids are brought up by two Dads. It’s honest, welcoming text is brilliantly brought to life by spirited illustrations. It’s unpatronising, unthreatening approach is a breath of fresh air. Simply put, this is an outstanding book, a book that fights evil and ignorance with joy, love and respect.

Inspired by Welcome to the Family we made a set of family puppets.

We started by taking a load of photos of each other, with our faces showing different sorts of expressions. I cropped our heads out and resized them so they were only 1.5-2 cm tall, before printing them out.

(Alternatively you could also go to a passport photo booth and get have fun there, coming home with strips of faces.)

Next we drew bodies and clothing. I gave the kids pieces of paper between 10 and 15 cm long and encouraged them to draw their bodies/clothes to fill the space; if your printed head is about 2 cm big, you’ll need the bodies to be between 10 and 15 cm long if you want them to be approximately in proportion to the heads. The kids found the scale issue a little difficult to begin with, but it definitely helped to give them rectangles of paper approximately the right size, rather than big sheets of paper.

We cut out the heads and bodies and stuck them onto wooden barbecue skewers using label stickers, but you could use tape.

Now we were ready to act out all sorts of family dramas!

Whilst making our family puppets we listened to:

Other activities which could work well alongside reading Welcome to the Family include these:

What are your favourite books about families?

Disclosure: I was sent a free review copy of Welcome to the Family by the publisher.

Imagine packing up your home, leaving Earth and setting out to travel across space to colonise a new planet.

The journey will take so long you’ll be put into a cryptobiotic state. But there is absolutely nothing to fear: You’re on sleek new spaceship, looked after by a team of well-programmed robots, and everything has been carefully thought through. When you finally arrive at Nova Mundi (it only takes 199 years to get there), you’ll be woken up to a delicious breakfast and the start of a whole new and wonderful life.

It sounds great, doesn’t it?

And so it is in Cakes in Space by Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre. Astra and her family are on their way to their new home but – you’ve guessed it – something goes wrong. Astra wakes from her suspended sleep, and feeling peckish goes off in search of a chocolate biscuit.

The Nom-O-Tron (a highly developed version of Star Trek’s Replicator) satisfies Astra’s request, but when she’s tempted to ask for something a little more outlandish (how many times have you seen the word “Ultimate” used to describe a dish?) something goes awry. Soon Astra is hurtling through space surrounded by cakes which have learned to evolve. Cakes which are fed up of being eaten themselves. Cakes which have developed a killer instinct.

Will Astra be able to save her family from the Ravenous Crispy Slices and Ferocious Fruit Cakes stalking the spaceship’s corridors? How much more complicated will things get when a second front opens up and her spaceship is raided by alien life forms known as Poglites, desperately searching for their holy grail, that technology which they haven’t been able to master: SPOONS.

Yes, this is a totally surreal and deliciously outrageous story of friendship, ingenuity and hundreds and thousands.

It’s fast-moving, exciting, just ever so slightly scary in that enjoyably adrenalin pumping way and above all it’s FUNNY! Add into the mix some genuinely beautiful writing (sometimes young fiction is all about the plot and the language – especially for an adult reading it aloud – can be somewhat unremarkable, but Reeve at times writes sentences which I found myself wanting to copy out), a plot which will enthral both boys and girls of a wide age range, and the subtle inclusion of some philosophically meatier issues (the consequences of greedy desire, the demonisation of that which we don’t know and can’t name) and you’ve got yourself a remarkable book.

Image: Sarah McIntyre. Please click on the image to be taken to the original blog post – well worth reading!

McIntyre’s illustrations are a crazy but perfect mix of 1950s brave new world sleekness and outrageous sponge-and-icing based fantasy. I’m delighted that Astra’s family are mixed race (this isn’t mentioned in the text at all, but how great to see some diversity just as-is, without it being an issue in the book).

The top-notch content of Cakes in Space is matched by a stunningly produced physical book. Like last year’s Reeve and McIntyre production, Oliver and the Seawigs, this is first being published as a small hardback in pleasingly chunky, strokingly hand-holdable format. Everything about the book is appealing.

After indulging in a solo read, I read this book aloud to both girls over a couple of days last week. Before we’d even finished the books my girls were off to raid the cutlery draw in the kitchen for highly prized spoons to create a collection of which any Poglite would be proud.

Carefully curated, they labelled every spoon with where it had been found in the galaxy, its rarity and its monetary value (I can see how this could develop into a Top Trumps game…)

Spoons are one thing, but cake is another, and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to host our own mini Cakes in Space party. We baked a host of fairy cakes and then turned them into KILLER CAKES…

Lollies made great eyes on stalks…

… as did Maltesers and Aero balls.

We had fun making teeth out of snapped white chocolate buttons, tictacs and rice paper snipped to look like rows of sharp teeth.

We also had some Ferocious Florentines and Sinister Swiss Rolls (helped along with edible eyes).

Other characters from the book were also present: The Nameless Horror was a big bowl of wobbly jelly dyed black with food colouring and with licorice shoelaces reaching out across the table, and jars of purple gloop (thinned down Angel Delight, again dyed to give a good purple colour) with gummy snakes in them made perfect Poglite snacks. Alas these were guzzled before I got to take a photo!

Preparing for the party was at least as much fun as the party itself…

Great music for a Cakes in Space party includes:

Other activities which would make for a great Cakes in Space party include:

We’ve all heard of Death by Chocolate, but what’s the nearest you’ve come to being killed by a cake?

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of Cakes in Space from the publishers.

Wolfman is terrifying!

Wolfman is threatening!

Wolfman is unstoppably destructive!

And he’s coming your way!

But let me reassure you: Wolfman by Michael Rosen and Chris Mould is also so funny, you might just wet your pants

On one level a moral about how those we demonise are human underneath, this wickedly enjoyable book about what can turn us into monsters is an enormously enjoyable book to read aloud. It’s thrilling and frightening, secretly appealing to many kids’ desires to wreck havoc and run wild, whilst (without revealing the brilliant final twist of the tale) drawing on a situation just about every child can identify with (one of Michael Rosen’s especially honed skills).

Chris Mould’s illustrations, with a limited and unusual palette, are sublime. Scary and scared eyes pop out everywhere and the scratchiness of the drawings befits Wolfman to a T.

Rosen’s story was first published 16 years ago and I haven’t been able to track down a copy to see if it was illustrated then, but Mould’s illustrations exude the vigour and excitement of the story in such a way as makes the text and these images seem inseparable. In fact, the penultimate page of this edition is one of my favourite illustrated spreads of the year; its drama and framing guarantees reader and listener will be holding their breath and scared to turn the page at that precise moment. (You’ll simply have to read the book yourself to see what I mean – it’s far to much fun to give the game away here!)

Attention to detail in the production of this book is another of its delights. From the name plate which encourages reading as a shared experience, to the die-cut “rips” in the front cover this is yet another great book (designed in such a way to support parents with dyslexia) from Red Squirrel.

Hair-raising and horribly fun, Wolfman is a riotously funny read, bound to be requested time and time again.

Once we’d stopped giggling and got our breath back J decided to make herself a Wolfman mask using a paper plate and some wool.

I cut out two small eye holes in the plate and drew the outline of large eyes. J then painted the plate with a mixture of poster paint and glue.

Having mixed in the glue with the paint, it was very easy for J to stick on lengths of wool all around the edge of the plate, as well as adding two ears cut from a brown paper bag.

J scrunched up the rest of the paper bag for the nose, added a few white paper squares as teeth and taped a bamboo pole on the back to hold the mask up to her face.

Then all that was left was to rush around the garden terrorising everyone

Whilst J made her mask we listened to:

Other activities which would go well alongside reading Wolfman include:

Using a pair of toy glasses to give yourselves eyes just like the characters in Wolfman – find some with a black rim, and then cover the lenses with white paper with tiny holes cut out for looking through. The back of these toy glasses (found here) gave me the idea:

What makes you grizzly? What naughty-but-nice picture books have you read recently?

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of Wolfman from the publisher.

A rich and warm-hearted coming-of-age tale, Head over Heart is an impressive and important debut novel from Colette Victor.

An adolescent girl is smitten with a boy in her class. But she fears her family would disapprove of her spending time with him. How can she balance her wishes with those of her family? How does she work out what she really feels, when whatever course of action she takes may make someone unhappy?

Victor’s novel is finely told, with an eye for emotional complexity, but what makes it stand out for me is how very relevant it is today in Britain with all this talk of “British values”; the heroine in this story (which made me cry quietly as I reached the final pages) is a Muslim girl, trying to work out some of the issues any teenager might face to do with friendship, love, lust and just who they see themselves as, who they want to be, but she is having to do this at the same time as trying to find a comfortable place between or across two apparently very different cultures.

Ideas of what is right or wrong, what is appropriate or not are thoughtfully explored. There are no easy answers, but there’s lots of respect and understanding, quietly woven into the pages. Whilst it is brilliant to see some publishing diversity (how many other novels for young teenagers can you think of with a Muslim main character?), I firmly believe this is story relevant to any adolescent (and indeed any parent of young people just entering that crazy time of their lives when hormones run riot), whatever their cultural or religious background.

If you enjoyed Anne Booth‘s Girl with a White Dog I’m confident you will love this book, which also explores how life in Britain today is incredibly enriched by the many cultures that find a home here. Pertinent, moving, and at times challenging Head over Heart is a book which makes the world a little better for enabling us to walk in each others shoes and understand our neighbours and ourselves a little more.

Perhaps the last comments of my review should go to a friend of mine: I lent my copy of Head over Heart to a Muslim friend who first warned me that it might take her ages to read the book. Within pretty much 48 hours she was back: “I couldn’t put down the book!” “Her writing is so beautiful.” “I would definitely give my daughter this.”. She also talked about how for her as a parent who didn’t grow up in the UK (but in Pakistan) it was very interesting and helpful to think about the differences between her own childhood and that of her UK born children.

Authors write outside their experience all the time but I still felt it would be interesting to hear what Colette Victor had to say about the experience – she was born in South Africa and now lives in Belgium. Here’s what she had to say to me:

“The magic of being a writer is being able to leave your own predictable and familiar existence to temporarily take up residence inside another person’s skin, a different set of circumstances, a new world all together. If the only viewpoint I was supposed to write from was that of a white, middle-aged South African woman living in Europe, I doubt I’d be doing any writing at all. I certainly wouldn’t have any readers.

So why did I feel I had the authority to write from the perspective of a Muslim teenage girl living in Europe? Well, it all boils down to my job, really. I live and work as a community worker in an ex-mining city in Belgium with a large immigrant population. I’ve worked with many different groups of people over the years – children, senior citizens, ex-convicts, job seekers, resident groups and mothers. Many of the young people and mothers I work with are of either Turkish or Moroccan origin – their families came out here over fifty years ago to work in the mines. I’ve heard countless personal stories, been inside scores of homes and spent hours in the company of young Muslim girls and their mums. I also spent a lot of time interviewing some of these girls to find out their viewpoint on various issues and, I can tell you, they’re as vast and varied as any other group of women.

One of the reasons I set out to write Head over heart was because there are so many misconceptions surrounding the headscarf. People often see it as a symbol of female oppression. Through my work I’ve met many proud, strong women who choose to wear a headscarf as a symbol of their identity, despite the opinions for or against it. I know married women, widows, single mums and emancipated university students who wear a headscarf because that’s who they are and not because there’s a man standing in the wings demanding it. On the flip side, I also know many women who would seem Westernised and wear Western clothing but live an existence of subjugation and submissiveness behind the scenes. I know Belgian women, Christian women and atheists – some lead proud, strong lives, some live in fear and submission. Ultimately it’s about looking further than cultural accessories and seeing the person underneath.

My daughter, Stella, who’s about the same age as Zeyneb, had a Muslim best friend for all her nursery and primary school years. The two girls were always together, doing homework, dressing up, sleeping over at each other’s houses. As my daughter’s friend got older and her body started changing, she often expressed concern about the fact that soon her carefree childhood would be behind her and she’d have to make the choice of wearing a headscarf or not. This is what got me thinking about all the cultural pressures at play in making such a decision and this is what I explored through Zeyneb’s eyes in Head over heart.”

My thanks go to Colette Victor for her thoughts on this. And thank you – this has been a long post, but I really think this book deserves the time and space I’ve devoted to it dtoday for it is an excellent, thoughtful, and highly relevant début.

Indulge me: Have a quick brainstorm about picture books you know for young kids which explore what it feels like to be different?

[Go on! Play the game!]
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Of those you’ve come up with, how many are about emotions rather than physical characteristics?

How many of them feature humans rather than animals?

How many of them have a boy lead character rather than a girl?

[I came up with very few, and even then I needed help from the ever resourceful and generous Letterbox Library. Between us we came up with Oliver by Birgitta Sif, Eliot Jones, Midnight Superhero by Anne Cottringer and Alex T Smith, Weslandia by Paul Fleischman and Kevin Hawkes but that was pretty much it.]

So when Made by Raffi written by Craig Pomranz, illustrated by Margaret Chamberlain (@madgiemadge) appeared in my hands for the first time I sat up and noticed; it’s about a boy who feels he doesn’t quite fit in, for instead of football, his passion is knitting and sewing.

Although he’s a curious and generous kid, he feels sidelined at school. Unlike most of his classmates, he doesn’t like noise and rough play. But thanks to a supportive teacher he discovers a new passion – making his own clothes. When it is time for the school play could this new skill help him gain the respect of his peers? Without giving the game away, the ending is upbeat, but also authentic. This isn’t a sugar-coated story. (For the really interesting background to the story, take a look at this article).

This book deserves to be in every school and read in every family for a whole plethora of reasons. It’s bold, tackling gender issues that many adults might skirt around: I love Pomranz daring to use the word “girly“, and it certainly helped us talk about how being a girl interested in ‘boys’ things’ is often more accepted by society than a boy interested in ‘girls’ things’. It’s big hearted; not just the warm, loving family Raffi is part of, but also his supportive school. It shows all sorts of children playing together, with different skin colours and different physical abilities, as well as different interests. It’s a joyously inclusive book, which tackles big themes gently and playfully.

Margaret Chamberlain’s illustrations are delightful. She uses colour very cleverly to portray moods and to mirror how much more interesting – indeed colourful – the world is for a diverse range of characters; wouldn’t the world be a dull grey place if we all liked only the same things?

A book about loneliness, respect, difference, and learning to trust your instincts even when it means you don’t follow the crowd, Made by Raffi is a vital, delightful and unusual book I urge you to share.

M and J were recently shown how to knit by their Grandma, and reading Made by Raffi offered the ideal opportunity to practice their recently acquired skills. (Here are some Youtube tutorials we found helpful to refresh our memories of what Granny had taught us: Casting on, knit stitch, casting off.

Having a ball of wool with lots of different colours on it was an effective tool in motivating the kids; each child would knit one or two colours and then hand the needles and ball over to the other. It gave them easy targets to aim for, and I’m sure this is partly why they completed a long scarf far more quickly than I was expecting.

Whilst knitting we’ve been listening to:

Other activities which would go well with reading Made by Raffi include:

Other picture /illustrated books which feature knitting include:

If you like the sound of Made by Raffi and are anywhere near Edinburgh in August, don’t miss the chance to meet author Craig Pomranz talking about his book as part of the Edinburgh Book Festival.

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book from the publishers.

Mr Tibbles – a shy reporter on the local newspaper – has been threatened with the sack. It’s perhaps no surprise: Mr Tibbles is mad about cats, and all his stories end up revolving around felines one way or another. What his editor wants, however, is news!

Photo: Sarah

An act of kindness brings Mr Tibbles into contact with Minoe, a rather strange young woman who appears to be able to talk to cats. Through the town’s network of feline pets and strays Minoe starts starts to deliver interesting titbits of exclusive news to Mr Tibbles; cats across the city overhear all sorts of conversations often revealing juicy gossip and insider information, and when Minoe learns of these pieces of news from kitty comrades, she passes them on to her friend the reporter.

Mr Tibble’s job is looking up until he uncovers information which could lead to the downfall of a local powerful businessman. Will the reporter be brave enough to expose the evil goings on? Will he be believed, when his only witnesses are pussy cats?

A funny and yet quietly profound tale of courage, friendship and what it really means to be human, The Cat Who Came in off the Roof, by Annie M. G. Schmidt, translated by David Colmer is a gem of a story. Ideal for fans of The Hundred and One Dalmatians, or cross-species tales of identity such as Stellaluna or Croc and Bird, this book would make an especially good class read-aloud, with lots of opportunities to discuss what life looks like from different perspectives, helping readers and listeners walk in another’s shoes, as well as perhaps learning a thing or to about overcoming shyness, and how to stand up for what you believe in.

From the mangy, feisty stray cat who you end up rooting for, to the hilarious school cat with a penchant for history lessons and a slight;y different (some might say out-dated) understanding of the term ‘news’, Schmidt has populated her story with a super array of characters. The narrative beautifully unfolds with unseen and fine tuning, climaxing with an exciting and rich ending which is deeply satisfying even though not everything is tied up neatly and not all strands end happily. Despite plenty of kittens and purring, this book never patronises its readership.

Knowing the original Dutch language version as we do as a family, I can also comment on the gorgeous translation. Colmer has wittily and cleverly translated linguistic and cultural jokes. His phrase ‘miaow-wow’ for when the cats meet up for a big parley is genius and has now entered our family parlance. If I nitpick I might personally have chosen -thorpe rather than -thorn for the Dutch -doorn, when translating the town’s name but I feel mean mentioning this as Colmer’s voice is pitch-perfect; at no point will you notice the text as a translation for it reads authentically and smoothly.

This must-read book will make you laugh out loud (whether you are a dog person or a cat fan). It will make you feel like for a brief moment you’ve witnessed and understood the best of humanity. It may also make you rather nervous next time you find a cat sitting ever so quietly next to you whilst you are having a private conversation!

I do so hope Pushkin Press are now thinking about translating Schmidt’s earlier work, Ibbeltje, which shares many characteristics with The Cat Who Came in off the Roof and has the added advantage of brilliant illustrations by another glittering star in the Dutch children’s literature firmament: Fiep Westendorp.

For reasons which will become clear upon reading this charming and magical book Minoe not only can speak the language of cats, she is also known to climb trees when dogs approach. It took about a nanosecond for M to decide she wanted to play-by-this-particular-book by climbing as many different trees as she could one afternoon at the weekend. So, armed with a local map (printed from http://www.openstreetmap.org/) we set off to map all the local trees good for climbing in.

Each tree we climbed we identified (it seems that around us oaks, ash and willow are the best climbing trees).

We remembered the last time we deliberately climbed trees in order to read on location.

Getting out and climbing a tree? Reading a truly terrific book? What more could you ask for as a lovely way to while a way a few hours!

Whilst climbing we weren’t listening to music, but these tracks could go with reading The Cat Who Came in off the Roof:

Other activities which you might be inspired to try alongside reading The Cat Who Came in off the Roof include:

When did you last climb a tree? What secrets might your cat be able to tell me ?

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of The Cat who Came in off the Roof from the publisher.

And briefly…. thank you with all my heart to all of you who commented on my last post, or got in touch via email, phone, snail mail and more. Life goes on and plots are being hatched and plans being laid. As and when I can reveal more I’ll be sure to let you know the latest.

Image: Paul Reynolds

Image: DomiKetu

Image: Merlijn Hoek

Kittens and Cute. They go together like purple and prickles, tigers and teatime, picnics and lashings of ginger beer.

And in Max the Brave by Ed Vere (@ed_vere) we meet another very cute kitten. He’s small, and black and has big bright eyes.

But even though every reader who picks up this book will definitely find Max adorable and charming, Max himself definitely does not want to be called cute. He wants to be big, grown up and brave. And to prove his mettle he’s going to hunt down his nemesis… a mouse.

But therein lies a problem. Max does not know what a mouse looks like.

The kitten’s not-knowing-any-better does indeed result in displays of exuberant courage and kids every where will identify with Max’s desire to be be hailed a hero, his refusal to lose face and the simple joy and playfulness of the chase to say nothing of the everyday challenges which arise from simply having to learn how the world works and what it made up of.

This book is an example of storytelling – in both words and pictures – whittled down to the very purest. With only a word or two on many pages, plain typesetting, apparently simple, unadorned illustrations (where much of the impact comes from the page colour and large empty spaces rather than highly detailed or vast drawings). In its bareness there is a direct line to the story, the humour, the characters. There’s nowhere for this story to hide, no embellishments, no fancy details, and this clarity gives the storytelling a freshness that is bold and very exciting.

Restraint may be present in Vere’s brushstrokes (he captures moments of determination, puzzlement, fear poetically and precisely – just take a close look at Max’s eyes on each page to get a sense of what I mean), but this is vividly contrasted with an exuberant use of colour to fill the pages. From Meg and Mog to several fabulous books by Tim Hopgood and one of my most recent reviews, The Cake, there’s a great tradition in picture books of banishing white pages and using glorious swathes of intense colour to the very edge of the pages. One could do some fascinating research into background page colour and emotions at any given point in the story; here, for example, the pages are red when Max is annoyed, and blue with things are quieting down and Max is feeling soothed.

Readers and listeners to Max the Brave may hear echoes of the Gruffalo’s Child with its themes of bravery and danger as a result of not knowing what something looks like, but perhaps more satisfying will be the recognition of characters (or at least their close relatives) from other books by Vere. Is that Fingers McGraw being sneaky once again? Could that be the monster from Bedtime for Monsters making a guest appearance? And indeed, is Max related somehow to the Bungles in Too Noisy? How lovely to be able to imagine these characters having such an real, independent life that they can walk out of one book and into another.

Packed with so much laughter and sweet appeal this book will prove a hit with many, many families. It’s certainly one we’ve taken to our heart – so much so that the kids wanted to make their own Max and retell his story in their own inimitable style.

First J sewed a black kitty out of felt, with pipe cleaners for arms, legs (and one stuffed in Max’s tale so it could be posed.

M (pen name: Quenelda the Brave) then used our new Max to create montages for each page in Ed Vere’s gorgeous book. She modelled her scenes quite precisely, took a photo, and then (as a veteran of adding moustaches and more to photos in the newspaper) edited her photos in a graphics editor to add her own sprinkling of magic.

Here are a couple of pages showing Ed’s original work (reproduced with permission) and the corresponding scene M created:

“This is Max. Doesn’t he look sweet!”

“Max looks so sweet that sometimes people dress him up in ribbons.”

“Max does not like being dressed up in ribbons.

Because Max is a fearless kitten.
Max is a brave kitten.
Miax is a kitten who chases mice.”

Here are a couple more spreads created by M (with guest appearances by Elmer as the elephant in Vere’s book, and a Wild Thing who is mistaken for a mouse.)

M had enormous fun (and showed a lot of dedication!) with this – she’s recreated the entire book out of her love for Max. I wonder what Max will get you and your kids doing…

Here’s some of the music we listened to whilst making Max and our fan-fiction:

Other activities which would go well alongside reading Max the Brave include:

What’s the cutest book you’ve read recently?

Disclosure: I received a free, review copy of Max the Brave from the publisher.

Image: Marine del Castell

Red Squirrel, a new imprint from Barrington Stoke, is dedicated to creating exciting picture books.

Fair Enough.

But what makes them sit especially tall on the bookshelf is that as well as superb storytelling and inventive illustrations, these picture books contain lots of dyslexia friendly features so that grown-ups with dyslexia can also experience the joy of reading aloud to the kids in their lives.

One of their first offerings, All I said Was, written by former children’s laureate, Michael Morpurgo and illustrated by Ross Collins is a cautionary tale about the dangers of wish fulfilment.

Have you ever been reading a book and then fallen into a reverie imagining yourself as the character you’re reading about?

This is exactly what happens in All I said Was, and as a consequence – with the help of just a little magic, a boy and a bird swap places.

The boy-turned-bird is delighted. “This flying lark is amazing. I wan to to be a bird all my life.”

The bird-turned-boy is also pleased as punch: He discovers the joy of being able to read.

But is bird-life really all it’s cracked up to be? And can the magic ever be undone?

A quietly funny celebration of the power of a good book to transport us anywhere – safely – this is lovely story, told clearly and concisely. Its theme makes it particulars appropriate for opening a new venture which will hopefully enable more families to enjoy more stories.

Collins’ characterization and visual humour are especially strong (I particularly like his farmer and pigs). The illustrator also has the final say with a brilliant twist in the tale once Morpurgo’s words are complete. It’s a brilliantly satisfying, slightly naughty and rather funny end to a super book.

This is a book that could be enjoyed for so may different reasons – whether you’re looking for a prime example of illustrations doing so much to enrich a written text, a book celebrating how books can bring our imagination to life, or simply a funny story to share at bedtime – whether or not you yourself sometimes struggle with the written word.

All I can say is: Hurrah for Red Squirrel and their broadening of what it means for picture books to be inclusive.

Both M and J said they too would love to experience flying like a bird. The nearest I could offer them was the joy of flying…. a kite, made to look like a bird. Ah well, us parents, we can only try our best

We cut out very rough bird shapes from old plastic bags which we decorated with permanent pens. Once the feathers, beaks and eyes were in place we attached thin doweling to our birds. I used this commercial product as a starting point, cross referencing it with these instructions for making a diamond kite to come up with All-I-Said-Was-Kites Mark 1.

We each made one kite and then imagined us swapping places with the birds as we flew them.

Additional activities which could work well alongside reading All I said Was include:

Chasing pigeons. I don’t know a child who doesn’t love chasing pigeons!

Photo: Owen Jell

Music that goes well with All I said Was and the playing it induced in us includes:

If you could swap places with a character in a children’s book, which character would you swap places with (bearing in mind whoever you swapped with would take your place in your family/classroom/library….)?

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of All I said Was from the publisher.

Jackie at a recent book signing.

If you’ve already got a copy of the book you might want to have it to hand whilst you read what she reveals, so you can go back and look at the images with fresh eyes. And if you haven’t already found a place in your home for this piece of art between two covers, … well perhaps this post ought to come with a warning notice. There’s magic in and on the pages of The Ice Bear. Prepare to be charmed and enchanted.

“The Ice Bear began with an image in my mind’s eye. It was an image of a child, kneeling. Around the child there were bears, so that the child looked like the centre of a daisy and the bears were the petals. My job was to work out how to get the child there, and probably more important, how to get him out again. This is what books are about for me, asking and answering questions, and in the process discovering more questions.

The Ice Bear began with a friend, pregnant with her first child. Something went wrong. The baby stopped moving, at full term. He died. She had to deliver a stillborn child. A tragedy for her and the child and her husband. The way people reacted to this was a shock to me. Quick, rush over it, brush over it, hide it under business, do anything but face the pain. (Not Sophie and Jon. They couldn’t rush over it, hide it, they had to face it.) I wanted to do a book about a lost child, about loosing a child. This was a thread that wove into the book. Though few would know if I didn’t say and the book is dedicated to Rhoderic, and Sophie and Jon and also to Katie and Thomas who were born by the time the book came out.

Some of Jackie’s first sketches for The Ice Bear

The Ice Bear began with a wish to do a book about polar bears, and to weave into it transformation and a legend, of the trickster and the shaman.

The Ice Bear began when the flight of a raven began to stitch together ideas with its patterned flight in the Pembrokeshire sky, because all books are like rivers, fed by streams of ideas, coming together.

The book is part of a series of books I have written about animals, each with a cover that is a portrait of the animal, staring out from the book. The covers are strong, almost iconic, and the books are often given shelf space so that the whole cover is seen, rather than being placed spine out on a shelf. I am told by bookshops who put the in the window that they work like a charm to bring people in to the shop, and one shop in Edinburgh said that people often missed their bus as they crossed the road to get a better look at the Snow Leopard when that was in the window. There’s something about eyes looking straight at you that still holds a primitive magic over the wild parts of the human consciousness. When I paint an animal in this way I am not searching for the humanity in the animal. I am searching for the soul, the spirit of the creature.

Some of Jackie’s covers, including her forthcoming ‘Something About a Bear’

Having ‘begun’ with an image the story then builds into a balance of words and images. Picture books are meant to be read aloud. The language needs to taste good in the ear, to look right where it sits on the page. A picture book is like a theatre, each page a stage set for that part of the story and in designing each page I often include parts of the stories that are only in the pictures. Once open I try to keep the words inside the pictures. I want the book to become a world where the pictures and the words tell the story. The composition is thought out right to the corners and often the corners and edges are where the main focus of the story is. (You can see this best in the picture where the child finds his mother bear. The image dominated the page but in the top right hand corner there is the figure of the father, charging in).

I paint on smooth paper, arches hot pressed, beginning with pale washes and then building and building with layers and then smaller details. The paints that I use are Winsor and Newton Artist Quality watercolours, usually tubes, and I use ceramic palettes. I know these colours quite well now after 25 years of working with them. I know when to run wet into wet and how much water to use. Now I use sable brushes. They carry the paint so well and a brush like a series 7, no. 4 will allow a wide wash but also can pull the finest line when handled right. And in the same way that writing is like finding the answers to a series of questions, so too is painting. I am constantly asking myself questions, about composition and colour and line and finding the answers is what makes the book.

In The Ice Bear the mother and the father each have a totem animal. The mother’s is the Arctic fox, and often when it seems that the child is alone on the ice you can see the fox is there somewhere, watching. The father’s is the owl, a fierce sky hunter. The boy’s is the bear and always will be. And raven, the trickster, a character who is perhaps a force for good, perhaps bad. He steals the bear child, but takes him to the hunter and his wife who have longed for a child. And when it is time he leads him back across the ice and joins the bear people with the human people forever. So is she good, or bad?

During the telling of a tale things can change. When I originally wrote The Ice Bear the raven lured the child out over the ice with small shards of sea glass. But I had wanted the book to be set long before glass was invented. The child becomes the first shaman, a bridge between humanity and the bear people. It was a time when there were no borders and people wondered the land without any border controls. There was no concept of ownership of land. The very idea would have seemed ridiculous. And so I looked for something else, something more timeless and lit upon the idea of amber. Amber is natural, not a manufactured thing. And I have a necklace of amber beads that if taken apart by a mischievous raven would look just like the broken amber heart in the snow.

Jackie’s amber necklace

The Ice Bear has been published now in many languages, French, Spanish, Catalan, Danish, Swedish, Korean, Chinese, Japanese. This is one of the things I love about working with books. Words found on a hill top in Wales can travel the world. I also love the democracy of books. Paintings in a gallery are expensive and usually bought to be hung in one home. Books can be bought, translated, and borrowed from libraries. They can be shared.”

My thanks go to Jackie for so generously sharing some of the stories behind The Ice Bear.

The House of the Golden Dreams (an art gallery featuring Jackie’s work): https://www.facebook.com/TheHouseofGoldenDreams
Jackie on Twitter: @JackieMorrisArt
Jackie’s blog: http://www.jackiemorris.co.uk/blog/

Did you know that on Sunday it is International Dawn Chorus Day? It’s a day where all around the globe people will be rising early to greet the dawn and simply listen to bird song. If you can’t find a local event to join in with, you could instead simply curl up with The Dawn Chorus by Suzanne Barton (@suzannebarton0).

Peep the bird wakes to the sound of wonderful song. He’s determined to find out who’s singing so beautifully; could it be the owl, the mouse or the frog? Eventually he stumbles on a flock of birds, and he has his answer: It’s the Dawn Chorus!

And oh, how beautifully they sing. Peep is determined to join their ranks, but despite practising hard, he keeps missing his early morning auditions. Is there a reason why he’s not cut out to sing at first light? Will Peep every be able to fill the sky with gorgeous song?

A charming addition to the ranks of picture books which explore how creatures (or indeed we, the readers) react when we find out we don’t quite belong (I’m thinking, for example of Stellaluna, and Croc and Bird), The Dawn Chorus is a delightful, soothing tale about perseverance, and discovering who we truly are.

The eyecatching illustrations make great use of visual texture, with collage, decoration and especially effective looping swoops of paintbrush and patterns, capturing playful flight and joyful flurries of song. The restricted earthy orange/red/yellow palette makes this book gently glow – just like a warm sunrise held in your hands as you read.

Taking our lead from the cute birds in Barton’s book we decided to make our own flock to sing to us. I cut out several bird bodies, and cut slits in the middle of them.

The girls used doilies like stencils to decorate the birds’ chests, and then decorated those doilies (coloured them in) before folding them accordion style and then slipping them into the slits. Gently we slightly opened out the doilies to create wings, which we held in place with paperclips. We finished off the birds with small hand-drawn eyes, and tails created by taking half a doily and folding that like a fan before taping in place.

M and J then took the flock out to the garden, where they settled in our cherry tree.

Whilst making our birds we listened to:

Other activities which would go well alongside reading The Dawn Chorus include:

Do let me know if any of you make it on early on Sunday 4th of May!

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of The Dawn Chorus from the publisher.

If you were trying to support and encourage a young environmentalist, feminist or …anarchist (!) what books would you suggest for them?

I might give the newly re-issued Barbapapa’s Ark, or the simple but very effective What are you playing at?

Or if you were simply looking for a great read for your kids about making the world more peaceful and fairer where would you turn?

I might suggest The Arrival or The Island.

And if I were looking for more thought provoking books (as indeed I always am), I’d turn to the Little Rebels Children’s Book Award. Now in its second year, this is an award for radical fiction for children aged 0-12. Last year’s winner was the marvellous and moving Azzi in Between by Sarah Garland (my review can be found here), and this year’s winner will be announced in just a couple of week’s time.

The books shortlisted for this year’s award

The books, authors and illustrators in the running of the Little Rebels Children’s Book Award 2014 are:

I recently put a pretty tricky question to those authors who made it onto the shortlist:

If it were possible with a wave of a wand what would you change about the way the world works, to make it either more inclusive, less discriminatory, or a place which was more just and equitable?

Here’s how they replied…

Nicola Davies
Tricky. I have one practical thing and one that you really would need a magic wand for. The practical one is to make sure that every girl on the planet gets and education; women with confidence, education and power are the single biggest force for change.

And the magic wand one is to give all bankers, politicians, drug lords…all those in positrons of power over others to see the consequences of each of their actions on the wider world, as clearly as a movie and to feel them, as physical pain. I think that might be really helpful.

Deborah Chancellor
This one’s easy. I’d make sure half the people in every single profession were women. With my magic wand, fifty percent of all politicians, judges, business chiefs, religious leaders, generals (etc) would be female. Without a doubt, the world would be a fairer, more inclusive and generally more harmonious place. Perhaps one day we’ll make this utopia happen, but we’re still a long way off.

Andrea Beaty
I would create shoes that would transport people into the lives of others to show how their actions and attitudes affect other people. Many of the world’s problems would quickly straighten out if people who take advantage of others or inflict suffering upon others would have to walk a mile in the shoes of the people they disrespect, harm, or disregard. Perhaps Rosie Revere could invent the walk-a-mile shoes. She is very clever! Until we have walk-a-mile shoes, though, we have literature. It lets us each see the world through other people’s eyes. To walk a mile in their shoes. It gives us empathy. And that is more powerful than any magic wand.

An interior spread from Rosie Revere Engineer. Click for larger image.

Gillian Cross
If I could take one action to make the world fairer and more equal I would make education available and affordable for all children across the world, especially girls.

Gill Lewis
I would wave wand to enable us to be able to change our skin with people and animals…to walk a mile in their shoes…or hooves!

In Harper Lee’s story, To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus gives Scout a piece of moral advice;
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Most prejudice or discrimination is born of ignorance, indifference and fear of the unknown. To truly understand another’s situation is to live their life, to see the world from their point of view. I would extend this to animals too, for us to live an animal’s life; to live as elephant, an eagle or a honeybee and to be able to see the adverse effects we humans have on the natural world and to understand the consequences of our actions.

Unfortunately we don’t have magic wands, but we have the next best thing…books!

Books transport us into other worlds and give us some insight and understanding of others’ lives.

Until I find that magic wand, I’ll keep reading and writing books!

Unfortunately Geraldine McCaughrean and John Boyne were not able to take part; I would have been very interested to hear what they might have chosen to do with a wave of a wand.

And as for me? What would I magic up? I found myself nodding wildly at all the responses above, but if I were to offer something different here’s what I might conjure up: If looking just at the bookworld, I’d get rid of gendered marketing and watch with great interest to see how it shakes up (or otherwise) book sales. On a bigger scale, I’d ban private car ownership, and invest massively in public transport. It would do wonders for not only environmental health, but also personal well being I believe. And if I could move mountains, I’d change how economies work so they don’t have to be predicated on consumption.

What would you do with a wave of your wand to make the world a better place?

If you are after further interesting reading matter to foster your own little rebels, you might enjoy looking through this list of books for children and young people as compiled on the Marxist Internet Archive. “Some of these books were written to be expressly radical, and others need a stretch to find political implications.” Thanks go to Betsy Bird for alerting me to this bibliography.

Little Rebels Children’s Book Award is given by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers and administered by Letterbox Library and the winner will be announced at the London Radical Bookfair on May 10th 2014.