Growing Together: 4 Stories to Share.  Growing; Imagining; Exploring; Sharing.

This quartet of picturebooks, neatly boxed, taps imaginatively into the preoccupations of young children. The pictures, alive with a strong line and intense colours, are full of warmth and feeling.   Each book has a short written text and the first person voice adds intimacy.  Growing begins with ‘When I was a baby…’ and is a little boy’s resavouring of his own infancy on the arrival of a new sibling.  A little girl’s imaginings of the stages her mother went through before she had children is the theme in Imagining.  In the most dynamic of the four books, Exploring, a little boy is taken by his father on exciting journeys in different vehicles a bike, a scooter, a car and a boat.  The warm humour that enhances each book is particularly appealing in Sharing: twin girls share everything – but while sweets and apples are easy to divide a wooden toy is more of a challenge. The solution? The dog is taken apart and becomes two birds.  And they share the little cat – looking worried at witnessing the dividing of the toy – by each cuddling half of it.  A lot of talk and laughter will accompany sharing these books at home or in the nursery school setting.