Books › Once Upon an Island
“Once I had my own children I began to think differently about children’s literature. Sitting with my young daughters, reading the same books over and over again, I developed a new respect for this form. The beauty and poetry of some of those picture books for very young kids! How they stand up to countless re-readings; how their child and adult readers respond differently the second, third, hundredth, thousandth time… You can see how The Very Hungry Caterpillar becomes the Odyssey. One the cocoon, the other the butterfly.
The books we read our children, the stories and images that form them, are so precious and important. Those books make the people who will make our world.
When my children got older and we began reading books full of interesting facts about science and history and nature, I missed the beauty of some of those books for younger children. So it was a joy, later, to discover the work of the publisher Magic Cat, where the images are as alluring as the stories are interesting and informative.
It has been a privilege to work on Once Upon an Island, which takes children on a journey across the world, from the south of the world to the north, from one island to another as we travel through oceans, along rivers, into lakes and estuaries and coasts. I was drawn to islands with strong stories of independent-minded women. Each of the twenty island stories in the book is accompanied by an interview with a real life island woman, from Miriam, a fisherwoman, in Chiloé, Chile, to Sawyer, an illustrator in Madagascar, to Marisa, working in the Town Hall in Yonaguni, Japan, and Maria, an organic farmer in Lesvos, Greece.
Everything in the book has been illustrated beautifully and with great care by the artist Helen Cann. She paints everything by hand in watercolours. In our crazy, troubled world her gentle illustrations are a salve and a solace.”
One of the Bookseller’s Children’s Highlight of the Season
A National Book Tokens’ 40 of the Best New Children’s Books Stanford’s Book of the Month
The Week Junior – Easter Book Pick
UK Hardback published March 5th
