Happy 90th Birthday Shirley Hughes! Today is Shirley Hughes’ 90th birthday, and I wanted to use this wonderful occasion to look at one of my favourite books of hers, Up and Up!, which was first published in 1979, and was re-released this year by Red Fox. We are accustomed to Hughes’ splendid timeless paintings and wonderful double-spreads …
Return Aaron Becker (Walker Books) Return is a spectacular culmination to the story told in the incredibly imaginative trilogy which began with Journey, (see the guest post by Aaron Becker here). A little girl, ignored by her father who is hard at work drawing (incidentally), uses her red pencil to open a door to an …
In “The Accidental Graphic Novelist” (see Wordless Picturebooks: “A Voice for the Voiceless” Part 1), Shaun Tan speaks about giving a voice to the voiceless through the medium of the graphic novel. But being voiceless can mean many things; one can be voiceless in the same way as the characters Here I Am and The Arrival, but being …
“A Voice for the Voiceless”. This is how Shaun Tan describes his picturebooks, and more particularly The Arrival in his article for the October 2011 edition of Bookbird “The Accidental Graphic Novelist” ( you can also access it for free here, and I urge you to read it). He continues by saying that graphic novelists (citing artists …
Journey, 2014 Caldecott Honor Book, and its sequel Quest are two stunningly illustrated wordless books by Aaron Becker (Walker Books). They follow the adventures of a young girl who during a boring afternoon draws a door with a red marker pen. The pen turns out to be magical and the door turns out to be …
I have been thinking a lot about wordless books for a while now, in fact for a year, after the 2014 Caldecott winners were announced: Why? Because apart from the three honors books are all wordless or quasi-wordless (in the case of Mr Wuffles!). How fascinating, and unheard of, here particularly. No wordless book …
