Reviewing is an odd business. One receives a seemingly random selection of books. The first task, after reading them, is to find a common denominator, some ‘glue’ to hold the review together. This time, the glue was easier to find than is sometimes the case. They are all picture books aimed at kindergarten or early to middle primary school, so if you want ideas about what to give your amazingl ... (read more)
What do these five picture books have in common? Well, they are all about animals, but they range from pre-school books such as Shutting the Chooks in, through middle primary with Gezani and the Tricky Baboon, to books for older readers such as I Saw Nothing. They also vary generically: The Elephants’ Big Day Out and Sherlock Bones are fantasies, Gezani and the Tricky Baboon is a retelling of an ... (read more)
Four artists have taken the natural world – its wildlife, its ecology, and its geology – and produced four books with entirely different aims. Kim Michelle Toft describes The World That We Want (UQP, $26.95hb, 32 pp) as ‘one that protects, feeds and shelters everything that lives on it’. Essentially, this is a factual book, but one suffused with a sense of wonder because of Toft’s e ... (read more)
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