Book Bites: All You Need Is Love


As the year rolls on, I am once again involved in the hugely gratifying task of presenting specially curated creative and higher thinking workshops to gifted and talented students throughout SE QLD. The programs are facilitated by G.A.T.E WAYS Education who stipulate a new fresh outlook on a plethora of subjects designed to take students deeper and more decisively into the worlds of language, science, maths, technology and more. For presenters, this is an all-consuming challenge but one that helps stimulate the creative verve and expand knowledge borders. And my latest, adventure? Well, it’s exploring the overlapping territories of lurvvve. Love. What it is. How it affects us. Why it’s the essence of art, history, humanity … life. And, its implications for hook-you-in-never-let-you-go storytelling.

This week’s (very belated) list of Book Bites therefore naturally revolves around this omnipresent, omnipotent emotion – love. All in the name of ‘research’, you understand. 😊

This Is Love by Zanni Louise and Sasha Haddad

This glowing picture book sums up the big question of what love is in a myriad of gentle, relatable ways that genuinely feels like a soft warm comforting hug. Lilting text illustrates the many guises of love: friendship, spontaneous affection, symbolic commitment, protective instinctive unconditional devotion, physical weakness, intangible sensations – ultimately something to share. Haddad’s sketched drawings hum with mellow colours and soothing movement underpinning each declaration of love. This, like the love of your life, is a true keeper. Highly recommended.

Title:  This Is Love
Author:  Zanni Louise
Illustrator:  Sasha Haddad
Publisher:  Affirm Press, $19.99
Publication Date:  January 2023
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781922848567
For ages:  3+
Type:  Picture Book

Buy the Book:  Affirm Press, Boomerang Books

How Do You Say I Love You? by Ashleigh Barton and Martina Heiduczek

This picture book tackles the multitude of linguistic possibilities to express those three little words, or more or less as the language dictates. Introductions are relayed in rhyme, explaining that love may be expressed in a number of different ways around the globe, not just with words. Expressive and multi perspective illustrations transport us through the homes and lives of children from Peru and Central Africa to Tonga and the Middle East, Korea and beyond. Homage is paid to Auslan – the Sign Language used in Australia, as well, all of which is explained in more detail in a tidy glossary at the end of the book. A handy classroom conversation starter.

Title:  How Do You Say I Love You?
Author:  Ashleigh Barton
Illustrator:  Martina Heiduczek
Publisher:  HarperCollins – ABC Books imprint, $22.99
Publication Date:  3 August 2022
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780733342172
For ages:  4+
Type:  Picture Book

Buy the Book:  Booktopia, Boomerang Books

Satin

Love can assume many forms. It can buoy us when we find ourselves sinking which is how we find Satin, a young man adrift in a sea of loneliness and haunted thoughts. Bathed in shades of ethereal blues, Satin scans his environment each day for scraps of blue. He scouts and gathers until his pockets are full, always accompanied, unbeknownst to him, by a silhouetted bird – a bower perhaps. Like the bower, he hoards his collection of blue which gladdens his other wise empty heart until one evening he discovers someone else in need of blue, too. A deposit is lovingly made. An act of kindness completed and then, before he has time to run away, a mosaic of emotions is cemented together. This exquisite tale is suffused with meaning, symbolic references (I love the inclusion of Blue Willow and the birds of happiness) and sublime irony portraying the intricate connection between emotions, colours, feelings and wellness. Highly recommended especially as a picture book for older readers.

Title:  Satin
Author:  Sophie Masson
Illustrator:  Lorena Carrington
Publisher:  MidnightSun Publishing, $29.99
Publication Date:  March 2023
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781922858016
For ages:  6+
Type:  Picture Book

Buy the Book:  MidnightSun Publishing, Boomerang Books

Pocket Treasure

This charming story depicts Allira’s favourite love, her dress with pockets. As a child, my outfit infatuation was a pair of snappy sandals that I could not be without. Allira’s fondness extends to her dress’s ability to store her many treasures which in turn fill her with contented delight. Her compassion to help others ultimately empties her pockets until she herself is in need of help. Beguiling illustrations and thoughtful text beautifully encapsulate the benefits of altruism; a true sign of agape love.

Title:  Pocket Treasure
Author:  Wenda Shurety
Illustrator:  Juliana Oakley
Publisher:  Affirm Press, $17.99
Publication Date:  January 2023
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781922848574
For ages:  4 – 8
Type:  Picture Book

Buy the Book: Affirm Press

Grandma’s Guide To Happiness

If there is anyone who knows anything about benevolent love, it has to be Grandma. Her often comical, ludicrously logical, sensationally silly approaches to happiness ensure an undiluted flair for life as do King’s splendiferous, always slightly magical, illustrations. Daddo’s impish narrative promotes imaginative play while probably reinforcing what most kids know intrinsically; that mess and muddle, splash and splodge are the keys to a happy life; made all the better with people like Grandma in it of course. Oozing with character, charm and grandparental love.

Title:  Grandma’s Guide To Happiness
Author:  Andrew Daddo
Illustrator:  Stephen Michael King
Publisher:  HarperCollins – ABC Imprint, $ 22.99                                  
Publication Date: 8 March 2023
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780733341304
For ages:  3+
Type:  Picture Book

Buy the Book:  Booktopia, Boomerang Books

Hedgehog The Wonder Dog

Love can be all shades of tough, too but if you have a wonder dog on your side, things look just a little bit brighter. This moving tale is a candid admission by one young boy undergoing treatment for what we may presume is some dastardly disease. He displays equal measures of resilience and resignation along with a deep unrelenting affection for Hedgehog, the special assistance dog aka mutt who visits him in hospital each week. She is outwardly ordinary and scruffy looking but Sam knows otherwise. It is this fervent belief in her extraordinariness and love for Hedgehog that gives him and kids like him, all the support, understanding and love they need. A genuine heart tug.

Title:  Hedgehog The Wonder Dog
Author:  Dannika Patterson
Illustrator:  Ross Morgan
Publisher:  Ford St Publishing, $17.95
Publication Date:  February 2023
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9781922696212
For ages:  5 – 9
Type:  Picture Books

Buy the Book:  Ford Street Publishing, Boomerang Books

A Perfect Wonderful Day With Friends

There is often nothing more lovely than spending a day with those who fill your life with special. These people need not be family rather your friends. In this rapturous romp through the woods, we follow Racoon’s quest to bust his boredom by visiting his friend Fox (who always has eggs because she has chickens). Fox is too busy to entertain him, requiring the aid of Badger’s ladder so off they troop to Badger’s house and on it goes. One delightful juxtaposition of fate follows the other as this incongruous band of buddies blossoms to five who despite never quite fulfilling their original intentions, enjoy a perfect, wonderful day together. Bubbling with subtle humour and harmonious purpose, this is tale of friendship not to be missed.

Title:  A Perfect Wonderful Day With Friends
Author / Illustrator:  Philip Waechter
Publisher:  Walker Books Australia – Imprint Gecko Press, $27.99
Publication Date:  June 2022
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781776574667
For ages:  4 – 7
Type:  Picture Book

Buy the Book:  Walker Books Australia, Boomerang Books, Booktopia

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Goldfish Boy

Image
Twelve-year-old Matthew Corbin is your regular pre-teen boy living in an unspectacular cul-de-sac deep in British suburbia. The major difference between him and the other inhabitants of Chestnut Close however is the state of his red-raw hands and tortured mind and the fact that he barely steps outside his terraced-home second story bedroom. Matthew is afflicted with severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, OCD and can barely function as a result. From his fishbowl vantage point, Matthew keeps track of his neighbours, dutifully recording their every movement, their comings and goings, and their habitual rituals in his notebooks. In this way we are introduced to the residents and their characteristic irks and quirks from the get go in a way that is both intriguing and comical. Matthew’s observations allude to his condition; he is both analytical and detailed in his approach. The orderliness of his notations suggest a mind used to repetition and accuracy, an intense desire to ‘get things r...
Read more

Review: Detention

Image
Tristan Bancks signed my copy of Detention with a note hoping it kept me turning pages . This book lived up to that promise and then some. Packed with page-turning tension and relentless drama, this is one middle grade novel that may cause a few kids to miss their dinner call. Yet despite the raw gritty urgency that suffuses nearly every page and the elevated sense of dread and desperation that keeps your heart in top gear, the pace is never too manic nor too hectic to enjoy the energising mix of edgy excitement and sincere emotion Bancks does so well. Dan is an inner suburban boy living on the outer perimeters of life. He’s classified as trailer park trash because of his permanent residence at the social-economically deprived Midgenba caravan park. It’s a title that comes with an ineradicable smear of hopeless. Deep down though, Dan’s a good kid, a caring kid. The type of kid who’ll risk his own face to save a vicious dying dog, which he does one day after finding Rosco tied ...
Read more

I've got a dream

Image
Almost a decade of moons ago, I made a serendipitous discovery that forever altered the spin of my world. Falling pregnant after so many years of waiting and yearning was nothing short of miraculous (for me) and a life event definitely worth waxing lyrical about. But did I? Sadly, not as much I as wanted to. There are those who find it hard to exist without sharing the contents of their dinner plates with the rest of  the world, then there are others who worry that a beautifully executed birthday cake photo shared on social media will somehow demean the starving populations of the world. I oscillate between the two but tend towards the latter, always fretting over how others will take good news in light of their own current situations and struggles, thus resorting to a severe downplaying of my own good fortune. The pregnancy of my first child should have been a joyous occasion - it was a joyous pregnancy after all - but I was acutely conscious at the time of another family me...
Read more