My Little World

Julia Cooke (author)

Marjorie Crosby-Fairall (illustrator)

Omnibus, Scholastic, Australia: April 2011

ISBN: 9781862917903

Genres: picture book, realistic fiction

Issues: environment, observation

A little boy is frustrated by the many birds and animals his grandparents see on a bushwalk but which he somehow misses. Then he finds that being small enables him to see the miniature worlds around him.

Insects, lichen, tiny mushrooms, the marks of creatures passing – all these he can see with ease, while taller folk tower above this almost-invisible world: 'While looking at some funny leaves/ That curled around their stalk,/ To my surprise in front of me,/ A twig began to walk!'

Marjorie Crosby-Fairall is an award-winning and highly respected illustrator. The works she has created for My Little World are so remarkably detailed and life-like that, as author Julia Cooke says, 'I'm not sure people will want to close the book for fear of squashing something.' Gum leaves so realistic that they can be picked off the page, ants that will crawl onto your finger if you put it too close, droplets of water that can be drunk from the leaves, skinks with bright, beady eyes that are ready to scamper to safety if you move the wrong way. Crosby-Fairall's beautiful illustrations draw the reader beyond the text and into the living world that Cooke celebrates in her flowing, rhythmic text.

Unfortunately rhyming text for younger readers is back in vogue – an almost endless supply of it, it seems – but plant ecologist Julia Cooke has a good ear for language and her verses trip easily off the tongue in a smooth walking pace that carries the beat of the bushwalker's feet. An excellent text to use with junior classes studying mini-beasts, My Little World is a treasure-trove for young environmentalists.