The World Is Big And I am Small

You can see several of Emma's books on the bottom shelf alongside other favourites.

If you are a picture book lover, or at least have an avid little reader of picture books in your house, there is a good chance that you will have already seen some of Emma Dodd's illustrations. In fact, if you have read some of previous posts we have already reviewed one of her books (here) and even after this post is written I have another series of books (though quite different) that I only recently realised were also illustrated by this versatile artist.

There are some books which simply touch your heart when you read them and that's why I wanted to share these books with you. When BookBairn was six months old and she first moved into her own bedroom, we created a 'favourites shelf' on which I place some of the books we are reading regularly, or recently borrowed from the library, or have just acquired. And the first book she chose from it, and subsequently chose over and over again was 'Me' (also titled 'I am Small') by Emma Dodd. It was also the first book that she properly engaged with by hunting out the little penguin on every page. I have now read this book so many times that I could easily recite it for you now without peeking at it's pages. "The world is big and I am small", it begins. In fact, you can see from the video that even BookBairn can recite the ending!

A video posted by BookBairn (@bookbairn) on Jul 11, 2016 at 6:36am PDT

This is a beautiful story that will pull on the heart strings of any reader, even now, if it's been one of those days, my eyes fill with tears as we read this story. It is the story told by a baby penguin of all the things in this world that challenge it: things that are big and long and deep and strong and high and far and steep. And the penguin is small. But there is one thing bigger than all these things, the parent penguin's love. Magical. To make this fabulous story even more magical, the pages of the paperback* are embellished with foil, making the pages truly beautiful.

The other wonderful thing about these books is that there is a whole series of them (see them all here)! We have borrowed most from our library and loved all of them. The illustrations are sweet with the parent and child characters at the centre of each page spread. The foil is simply used to highlight and glimmer.



*though not the board books, unfortunately.

We have not been sent any of these books, we own two of the board books and we borrowed the others from our local library service and for those of you living locally who would like to read them, we have since returned them. Reluctantly. x