Leaf (Stephen Michael King, Scholastic, $19.99 hb, ISBN 9781741691160, May) ****

This book will attract browsers to pick it up and dip inside, with its lettuce-green cover and plumpish small landscape shape. It is almost wordless, telling a story in a sequence of zestful pictures with just a few of the action words beloved of cartoonists: boing, snip, whoosh . King (illustrator of such favourites as Henry and Amy and Emily Loves to Bounce) excels at light line-and-wash set against plenty of white space. The main character, an unnamed child, bounces across the pages with joie de vivre, troubled only by the prospect of having his hair cut. A seed drops from a bird’s mouth and lodges in his untamed hair, then sprouts and grows, aided by sun and rain. There are subplots of bathing the dog and dreams of predators. When his hair is eventually cut, the child carefully places the plant in the ground where it grows into a fine and sheltering tree; later, as an adult, he takes his family to admire it. Leaf is light-hearted but touches on deeper topics of growth and change. An enjoyable doorway to literacy for children from about four years, and fun for adults who will pore over the pages and join the conversation.

Robin Morrow was a specialist bookseller and now teaches and reviews children’s literature

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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