How to Live Forever
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Cover Story
This issue’s cover is from The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Poetry (cover illustration by Peter Weevers). Edited by Alison Sage (who also edited The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Literature), this sumptuous anthology is loosely divided into four sections corresponding to age starting with nursery rhymes and first poems through to poems for older children and classic poetry. Poems from such modern poets as Roger McGough, Ted Hughes, Wendy Cope and Maya Angelou sit alongside poems by Longfellow, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shelley and Shakespeare. The anthology is illustrated in full colour and black and white. Newly commissioned illustrations from, for example, Quentin Blake, Shirley Hughes and Nicola Bayley are included alongside illustrations by Randolph Caldecott, Jessie Willcox Smith and Kate Greenaway. With such a comprehensive range of poems for 2-11 year olds and upwards, this is a wonderful family book.
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How to Live Forever
Another intriguing visual labyrinth from Colin Thompson, whose picture book Looking for Atlantis involved anodyssey through the intricately detailed contents of an old sailor's sea chest. In this fascinating book, the starting point is a library containing every book ever published. At night, when the library closes, the books open, growing spectacularly into strange cities and landscapes embedded within them. But the book entitled 'How to Live Forever' has been hidden, and when Peter and his cat Brian discover the loss, they leave their home inside a book about quinces and travel for two years into the very heart of the library, where the Ancient Child guards a tragic secret. The text of this book is brief and economical, but the haunting paintings are absorbing in their complexity, and might encourage children to invent a whole library of parallel narratives.
