It’s hard to believe that it’s summer here in the UK at the moment but the sunflower seed which Son Number One planted a couple of months ago is about 30cm tall and still growing - so we may eventually have a happy ball of sunshine in our garden to counteract the rain, which may also still be falling!
Keeping watch over every millimetre of growth has been a good time to read A Place Where Sunflowers Grow, this year’s winner of the Jane Addams Book Award for Best Picture Book. It is a beautiful and poignant story about one little American girl’s experience of adjusting to being interned during the Second World War because of her Japanese heritage; the character, Mari, is based on author Amy Lee-Tai’s own mother. You can hear Amy reading extracts from the book and talking about it here.
The book is published by the independent, non-profit publishing house Children’s Book Press, whose executive editor, Dana Goldberg, has just been interviewed by Just One More Book. It’s part of their Publishers’ Showcase, a special series of interviews with children’s book publishers – well worth listening to.
[…] own storyboards. We also read Home of the Brave recently, following the discussions arising from A Place Where Sunflowers Grow. Say’s rich illustrations here and the slightly abstract conveying of the story stretch young […]