These Are My Rocks

Bethan Woollvin is the author and illustrator best known for the gloriously inventive Little Red. Here she explores something maybe closer to home: what collecting is and how varied it can be. We are invited into what seems like Woollvin’s own collections (there is a page from her at the end, explain that she has a ‘lifelong love of collecting things,’) and here we see collections of pointy things, delicate things, things with too many legs…There is humour here, and details to ponder as the reader explores Woollvin’s goggly-eyed rocks, teapots and foodstuffs. What are the invisible things she has collected? How do you collect bubbles?

There are some issues in the voice the author has chosen to employ: Bethan Woollvin addresses the reader, a singular reader, directly, in a one-sided dialogue that – for me, at any rate – doesn’t always quite come off. I am not sure how a group of young children would respond to ‘I’ve heard you’d like to be a collector…But I’ll warn you, it’s hard work’ or the pages which show ‘my enormous collection of fan mail.’ This (invented?) voice seems to jar. Similarly, there is a question about how one starts collecting that the author seems not to address. The focus may be described as curating: most children who gather and sort things are already making choices about certain things – rocks, petals, wind-up toys – and are not looking for a varied series of collections which an adult is keeping on a whim… But this is perhaps churlish: this is, after all, a lively, funny book first and foremost, with vivid, typical Woollvin artwork, designed to give an enthusiastic collector something to delight in.