18,00 €
This lively and funny picture book aims to answer an important question: why should sandboxes in kindergartens be covered over at night? The story about four coluorful piglets provides an entertaining and unexpected explanation of a completely ordinary phenomenon from children’s everyday life – the covering over of the kindergarten sandbox at the end of the day. Although it relies mostly on humour, the story also unobtrusively raises important questions about order, responsibility, and shared space, which is extremely useful in a pedagogical sense for preschool and early school-age children. Laura Martinović’s collage illustrations skillfully follow the tone and rhythm of the text.
Ages 4 – 7
32 pages
21×25,5 cm
Hardcover
ISBN: 978-953-8553-33-2
How to choose a profession? This fundamental question is treated in quite an unusual way when a girl decides to be “a girl from the circus” – and gives good reasons for her decision. The girl’s mother gives examples of professions with the same advantages, but Irene finds a way to follow her dream.
Leo is sitting in front of the house, lounging in a chair and thinking about the past year. The summer was great and promised a good start to seventh grade: with his brother and some friends he had founded a rock band that played a crazy summer hit, played in an international orchestra in Slovenia, and also, he had bathed in the sea. But when he returned to the city, things started going downhill – their pet, a brown rabbit, disappeared without trace, seventh grade started “badly”, with a pile of books, endless assignments and papers, and disagreement broke out with the new fencing coach … Sanja Lovrenčić enriched Croatian youth prose with a realistic and entertaining novel which, through the eyes of the smart, witty and talkative boy Leo, his family and friends, makes us aware (or reminds us) of the problems of growing up. Through the clarity of a child’s mind, we are faced with the absurdities of the adult world, as well as absurdities in schooling (very well described in the chapter “When you write about spring for the seventh time”). Adolescence has never been easy, but this novel shows that it can and should be fun!
(recommendation of the Vladimir Nazor Library in Zagreb)
At first glance, the Moon seems to be the central character of these “twelve stories for daydreaming”, but various other characters alternate under its shine and go through many unexpected experiences: under its light, snow owls hold their annual ball, it serves the little fairy as the highest jump in the sky, a mouse will use it as a model for a picture of the ideal cheese… When it disappears from the sky, four cats go in search of it, and when it reappears it will serve as a swing for three crazy dogs, winners in howling competition… (illustrated by Pika Vončina)
In her second artist’s book, Agata Lučić takes readers of all generations to a flea market – an almost monochromatic blue world filled with various objects. Each thing there carries traces of time spent in someone’s life, traces of somebody’s past. The young visual artist evokes fragments of life that “forgotten things” shared with their humans in her original, very recognizable style, gradually creating a warm atmosphere – with bits of magic. The last double-page holds a surprise: as the objects manage to attract new owners and are being accepted along with their stories, various colors enter the world of the picture book. It is no longer a space of memories; it becomes a living space. “Forgotten Things” are both nostalgic and cheerful, they urge the reader to open up to hidden histories of unknown people and certain values accessible only to a watchful eye; they invite both children and adults to dream, offering a world of peculiar visual pleasure.
We acquire and discard things too easily, warns the author of this gentle and playful picture book; but even when they have already been discarded, left to their fate on the stands of some open-air “mini market”, they can be looked at, singled out from the crowd, appropriated, restored, and brought back to life.
Book #4909
