Jackie French
A pile of picture books to savour – what better start to the year? Experienced authors and artists are met again, and new favourites are found, in these eight books.
Margaret Wild and Freya Blackwood, wonderful book makers in their own right, make a special team in The Treasure Box (Viking, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 9780670073658). A boy and his fathe ...
Diverse memories of childhood, ranging from Indigenous and migrant experiences to the Great Depression, permeate these evocative Australian picture books. Admired illustrator Bruce Whatley displays his range of styles in a pair of them; two others are set in Western Australia and Queensland. The potential danger of water is a disconcerting theme.
...Many Australian picture book authors and illustrators continue to develop the genre in exciting and unusual ways...
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Pat Flynn’s Alex Jackson: Grommet gets off to a confused start: no less than fifteen named characters in five pages, and a narrator determined to cram in as much background information as possible. Eventually the story starts to sort itself out. When it does, as the title itself indicates, we are in Lockie Leonard territory. The surfboard is a skateboard, Dad is a retired boxer instead of a policeman and, like Tim Winton’s eponymous hero, Alex is having trouble adjusting to his first year of high school and coping with his raging hormones:
... (read more)A Dream of Seas by Lilith Norman & The Secret Beach by Jackie French
