Picturebooks

I have a new obsession with picture books. It all started with 'I have a right to be a child', which depicts the United Nations Convention on the rights of a child in language children can understand. A page that said something along the lines of 'I have the right to special protection, safety and freedom from war, it makes me scared when bombs and shells fall' made me sad, when I thought of the ongoing conflict in the middle east and the refugee children washed up on Turkey's shores. We fail tragically.

After that book, I searched for lists of 'The best picture books 2015' and found more treasures, including 'Sidewalk Flowers', 'The Girl who loved Wild Horses', 'Miss Rumphius', 'Singing away the dark', 'Extra Yarn', ,and of course ALL Keri Smith books.

One of my favourite picture books as a child was Percy the Park keeper stories, especially the one with the giant fold out picture of an oak tree house which all the animals lived in. The detail was incredible, slides cut in grooves on the tree trunk, little cubby holes and verandas built along the branches and inhabitants peeking out here and there, or sailing along the pond in rafts made of twigs and leaf sails... I also loved the aboriginal story 'When the snake bites the sun' and 'The kangaroo and the porpoise' and their animist dreamtime strangeness.

A couple of days ago I read the picture book 'Shackleton's Journey' which has become a favourite. I think I'm storing up all these books so that if I have children of my own I'll know exactly what to buy on Amazon. Stories of weirdness and wildness and imagination and ingenuity and kindness and compassion and creation and culture and adventure and bravery and simplicity and joy and exploration.

Picturebooks are also, as I have discovered, a good antidote to the heaviness of Spenser's Faerie Queene.