Marvellous Messages

Join Rose, her sign language interpreter Dev, Perky Pigeon and Halo the cat as they travel together through time and space discovering more about communication! Rose was born deaf and uses British Sign Language. She is an English actress and is famous for winning Strictly Come Dancing! In this book she fulfills her dream of shining a light on the many ways we communicate, as well as focusing on her superstars who have achieved great things despite their disabilities.

This gorgeous hardback has 29 stops on its long journey. It starts in the Olympic Stadium in Greece and ends in Rose’s home with many interesting visits along the way. I enjoyed looking around the Calligraphy Studio in China and learning about the ‘Four Treasures of the Study’ (p.29). These are brush, ink, inkstone and paper which are the four calligraphy materials. Rose brings the past to life with her text. When she visits the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, Perky explains that ‘Hieroglyphs are just really, really old emojis!’ (p.32.)

As well as interspersing the visits with information on Rose’s Superstars there are Messaging Milestones covering communication tools such as printing (p.30), the telephone (p.42) and television (p.60). The book is both well-structured and clearly laid out. It is bursting with information to satisfy the curious reader and probably works best as a volume to dip into rather than reading it from cover to cover in one go. I was fascinated to hear about deaf stuntwoman and racing driver Kitty O’Neil, for example, as well as the famous inventor Thomas Edison.

Many congratulations to the team behind this innovative publication. The vibrant illustrations work well with the text and the fusion of fact with fiction makes for an interesting read. I learned lots of new information with just the right amount of detail.