Yellow, Pink, Red, Green, Blue - popup board books by Aurore Petit

A rubber duckie . . . a raincoat . . . a ray of light! Infants and young readers will delight as these objects jump off the page in this unique “first colors” 

and “first words” pop-up board book.

There's a new little baby boy who has arrived to bring great happiness into the lives of the family of a friend of mine.  Yesterday I caught up with the new little man - he is now ten weeks old. I have of course given his and his mum and dad a selection of books and I was utterly thrilled to hear they are reading to him every day!!! I couldn't resist this pop-up book when I saw it in a city bookstore. The yellow raincoat page delighted the grandmother of this baby and she immediately burst into the raincoat jingle "wear a yellow raincoat when you're out in the wet" from her own childhood. 

Gecko Press bio: Aurore Petit was born in 1981 in France and currently lives in Nantes. She graduated from L’école des Arts Decoratifs in Strasbourg in 2006. She works with children’s books and illustrates for magazines and media, and has worked on books and stage design. She won the Millepages Prize in 2019 for A Mother Is a House. You can see some of her French titles here. 

Infants and young readers will delight as these objects jump off the page in this unique “first colors” and “first words” pop-up board book. These sturdy, small board books are absolutely perfect for little hands, but the clever and surprising images will appeal to all ages. Each spread is printed in black-and-white, but the six playful pop-up objects are filled in with a bold pop of color—a novel take on high-contrast books! Thames and Hudson

See Yellow and Pink in action on Instagram. I do hope we see all of this series in English Yellow and Pink arrived here in March, 2024. Pink - What is pink? A cat’s tongue . . . a sunrise . . . a lollipop!  

I see Red and Green are due here in Australia in September and they are a great price at less than AUS$15 thank goodness. [I saw a different and very appealing board book this morning on social media for over AUS$37]. Here are the French titles:

• Jaune POP
• Vert POP
• Rouge POP
• Rose POP
• Blanc POP
• Bleu POP
• Orange POP
• Noir POP

Sally Rippin Australian Children's Laureate 2024-2025

Image Source: South Sydney Herald

Begin with this seven-minute video where you can meet Sally Rippin and learn more about the Laureate and her focus:

All Kids can be Readers

My hope as Laureate is to ensure that all children can be supported to access reading 

in the way that suits them most.

Sally Rippin was born in Darwin and grew up in South-East Asia, moving country every couple of years because of her father’s work. At twelve years old, Sally’s family settled in Melbourne, where she completed her high school years before moving to China as a young adult to study traditional Chinese painting for three years.

Sally is very famous for the Billy B Brown books and Hey Jack and more recently the Polly and Buster series and School of Monsters . She has written over 100 titles.

Read about The Second Best Friend

Sally Rippin is such a talent - no wonder the Laureate foundation asked her to take this role for 2024-25. She has written a wide range of books from the very simply for our youngest children right up to Young Adult titles and a reference book for parents. AND she has also illustrated books too - her own and books by other talented Australian authors. Here some books by Sally Rippin which could be in your school or local library. I especially love her picture book Rainbirds which was a CBCA Honour book.

Board books:

Our Australian Girl:

It's 1956 . . . and Lina dreams of being a writer, but her strict Italian parents have other ideas. Now that she's won a scholarship to an expensive girls school, Lina has other troubles, too. But the Melbourne Olympic Games could be an opportunity for Lina to follow her dream of working on the school paper. Journey with Lina across all four exciting stories about a passionate girl finding a place to belong. Imaginative, kind and hard-working, Lina is an unforgettable Australian Girl.

I often mention Angel Creek a book I read more than a decade ago. Kirkus said: An intriguing and singular depiction of angels neatly wrapped up in a brief, captivating coming-of-age tale. I would love to find and re-read this:

Angel Creek

Sally Rippin contributed to many excellent junior book series such as the Solo series, Aussie Bites, and Aussie Chomps. 

Picture Books:

Gabrielle Wang was our previous Australian Children's Laureate.

Kirkus said: It’s nothing very original, but illustrations incorporating Chinese ink, linocuts and digital media in browns, oranges and greens are handsome, and each animal is named in maroon rectangles inscribed in white, looking as if they were produced with Chinese seals.

SallyRippin's first book was Speak Chinese Fang Fang! and then more followed with this delightful character. This first book won the New Illustrator or Creighton Award. 

Here are the web pages for the illustrators from books by Sally Rippin:

Chris Kennett

Stephanie Spartels 

Daniel Gray-Barnett

Lucinda Gifford

Lucia Mascuillo

Aki Fukuoka 

The ACLF’s mission is:

• to promote the value and importance of reading
• to raise the profile of books in the lives of Australian children and young adults
• to respond to identified needs and issues in the children's & youth literature national landscape
• to champion the cause of young australians' reading in a consultative, collegial and inclusive way within a cultural framework that showcases the best of Australian Literature for young people, and
• to undertake selected national projects that will promote these objects nationally.

Previous Laureates:

• Gabrielle Wang (2022–2023)
• Ursula Dubosarsky (2020–2021)
• Morris Gleitzman (2018–2019)
• Leigh Hobbs (2016–2017)
• Jackie French (2014–2015)
• Alison Lester and Boori Monty Pryor (2012–2013)

Letters to Santa

Image source: The Tayor House

It all begins TOMORROW - my Twelve Days of Christmas Letters.

Yesterday I mentioned my planned series of posts with some Christmas picture books which feature letters to Santa or Father Christmas or letters written at Christmas time. Starting tomorrow I will have my Twelve Days of Christmas which this year will focus on twelve posts featuring special Christmas books with letters.  Here are a few extras:

Here are the details from Kids' Book Review

Toddlers will love lifting the flaps to open the presents and find out what Santa has sent. 

Will he send the perfect present in the end? With gold foil cover, flaps to lift on every page and a touch-and-feel surprise ending, this festive favourite is the ideal Christmas gift ...

Rachel Rosenstein is determined to celebrate Christmas this year—and the fact that her family is Jewish is not going to stop her. In a series of hilarious and heartwarming mishaps, Rachel writes a letter to Santa explaining her cause, pays him a visit at the mall, and covertly decorates her house on Christmas Eve (right down to latkes for Santa and his reindeer). And while Rachel may wrestle with her culture, customs, and love of sparkly Christmas ornaments, she also comes away with a brighter understanding of her own identity and of the gift of friends and family.

Jimmy Dobbins is a young hockey player who has been very good all year—or so he tells Santa in a letter with a long list of gift requests. Subsequent letters from Jimmy to Santa throughout the month of December gradually reveal a hilarious litany of the previous year’s various mischievous incidents at home and at school, along with ongoing sibling squabbles with a younger sister (“the most annoying four-year-old sister on the planet”). The text is told entirely through these letters to Santa, set in a typeface that looks like a child’s printing on various kinds of notebook and memo paper. Kirkus

Working hard to deliver presents to children all around the world, Father Christmas realises that he has never received his own Christmas gift. Feeling fed up and underappreciated, Father Christmas decides to write his own letter. But, will the letter work? And if it does work, what happens if Father Christmas gets a little bit greedy?

Big Bug by Henry Cole

 

When I visit a library or bookshop there are a number of things I am always interested in - very easy beginner chapter books with enjoyable well written stories, scrumptious picture books with amazing art and again, great stories, and board books like this one. I marvel that this book has only 48 words and yet it is so satisfying right down the very last words - little nap!

The copy of Big Bug that I borrowed from a school library was published in 2014 as a hardcover picture book so I had little hope that it would still be in print. I am so pleased to see that the Board Book version of this book is available [9781534416901].  I think it is a measure of the importance of this book that it has been published in nearly every format - hardcover, paperback, board book, and even as an ebook. 

Blurb: Beginning with a beautiful close-up of a “big” ladybug, this adorable board book artfully depicts the concept of scale as it zooms out from the bug, to a flower, to a cow, all the way to an expansive spread of sky. Then author Henry Cole masterfully zooms back in from that sky, to a tree, to a house, to a window, all the way to the end where an adorable dog is taking a “little” nap. Young readers will love the lush illustrations of the animals, objects, and scenery of a farm, and they’ll delight in seeing how something “big” can suddenly seem “little” with every turn of a page!

This is a very simple book that is superbly done.  Cole plays nicely with perspective and with concepts.  The book can easily be used as a way to show the differences between big and small, but I think the real treat is showing children that perspective is important and understanding size is too.  Waking Brain Cells

Visually lovely and appealing. Kirkus

You could follow this book with Shrinking Mouse and for older children try to find Zoom.

Here is another book from this blog by Henry Cole.

Nesting

News from New Zealand

 

Image Source: Beck Wheeler

I live in Australia but New Zealand is our neighbor and so I do take an interest in their books and awards. It is terrific that our Magpies Magazine includes reviews and articles about New Zealand books each issue.

I have talked about The Lighthouse Princess in a previous post. It has now won 'Best First Book' in the 2023 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. The Lighthouse Princess, was also selected as the winner in the 2021 Storylines Gavin Bishop Award for Illustration.

Other winners are:

Picture book award

Duck Goes Meow (Juliette MacIver, illus by Carla Martell, Scholastic NZ)

Blurb: Woof! says Dog. Moo! says Cow. Cluck! says Hen, and Duck Goes ... Meow. 

A little yellow duckling is amongst animal friends who are all sure of the sounds they make: hiss, neigh, moo, cheep, cluck and oink. But when Duck goes ‘meow’, the other animals say no, that is wrong, 

try again ... then Duck’s mama arrives, and boy, do they get a surprise!

Esther Glen award for junior fiction 

Below (David Hill, Puffin)

Blurb: When Liam dares his classmate Imogen to come on a forbidden tour of the railway tunnel being drilled through a nearby mountain, he hopes she’ll quit protesting about it damaging the environment — his dad is an engineer working on the tunnel, after all. Just as they reach the huge tunnelling machine everything goes horribly wrong. When the rocks stop falling and the dust settles, they are trapped, kilometres below ground, in the dark. Water is trickling in and beginning to rise. And nobody knows where they are. Can they stop arguing and start working together to escape before time runs out?

Margaret Mahy Illustration Prize: Artists re-imagine The Witch in The Cherry Tree

Original book illustrated by Jenny Williams

To enter the prestigious prize, artists are given a Mahy book to interpret, and enter with a set of illustrations.

You probably already know, if you are a long-time reader of this blog, that I adore all books by the late New Zealand author and Hans Christian Andersen winner - Margaret Mahy.  I love that there is a competition to bring back her picture books with new illustrations - not that the originals were not wonderful but of course so many are now out of print.

The Margaret Mahy Illustration Prize is one of New Zealand’s pre-eminent illustration prizes, offering a unique opportunity for an unpublished New Zealand-based illustrator to illustrate Margaret Mahy’s classic stories. It was launched in 2019 to celebrate and honour the 50th Anniversary of Mahy’s A Lion in the Meadow.

In the Witch in the Cherry Tree (1974), David and his mum are making small cakes and it is the smell of the baking that lures a witch into the cherry tree. A few cakes are burnt and these are useful to throw at the witch. David knows the witch is dangerous but he can also see she wants some cake. In the original version quite oddly this book has a recipe for gingerbread in the back - I wonder if they included a recipe in the new edition? You can see the art of several of the illustrators who submitted entries for this award. 

Here is a part of an illustration by Jenny Williams and one from Jessica Twohill.

Here are a couple of text quotes:

"She perched there like a wicked black parrot and sniffed at the smell of baking."

"The witch pranced on the lawn with frenzy, fury and fiery wickedness."

Previous winners:

The Boy who made Things up

In my previous post I said "I wonder which book will feature for 2023 and beyond. If I could talk to the organisers of this illustration competition, I would loudly proclaim it should be The Pumpkin Man and the Very Crafty Creeper originally illustrated by Helen Craig. This story is such a joy to read aloud and it had sadly been out of print for too long!"

One more piece of New Zealand news. If you have not yet discovered Gecko Press take a few minutes to explore their website. I am very keen to see this new book for babies. It is in the form of a leporello.  

Blurb: A concertina board book of big bright faces to place around baby on the floor at tummy time—by multi-award-winning author/illustrator Gavin Bishop. Babies will love tummy time or learning to sit up surrounded by this beautiful two metre fold-out, wordless board book illustrating faces and toys in bright colors. This safe and sturdy concertina book is a perfect new baby or baby shower gift, with compelling illustrations of the things babies love. Friendly faces from the whole family combine with familiar toys and objects, drawn in bold lines with a striking minimalist color palette. Choose your cover and which direction to read this fully reversible book. Accordion-fold books are perfect for babies to strengthen core muscles at tummy time with the saturated colours, simple lines and open faces that babies are hard-wired to enjoy. As the baby grows the strong simple images are perfect for introducing first words and concepts, with family faces to name—including the dog—and objects that babies love to hold and explore—soft toys, ball, keys, an enticing pair of spectacles and more.