We’re Going Places

Following their exciting debut picture book While You’re Sleeping, author and illustrator, Mick Jackson and John Broadley have collaborated again creating another highly unusual and engrossing book. Herein, using travel and journeying Jackson’s poetic text and Broadley’s exquisite, detailed scenes, enable readers to follow the development of a young child right from those first unsure steps to confident walking out and about, onto bikes, skateboards and skates.

Then come the possibilities of becoming airborne; perhaps going to distant parts by train or plane when speed is important. At other times though, the journey is best taken slowly allowing time to pause and to ponder and to watch creatures undertaking their own journeys on foot, or on the wing like birds and bumblebees.

Some journeys are dependent on the weather or the season and even inanimate things like raindrops and clouds can be considered to have a journey.

There are choices to make and an almost infinite number of possible ways to go as well as ever changing means of travelling: who knows what the future might bring. One thing is certain though; as people age, their journeys are likely to become slower and might need support but those they’ve taken will remain with them throughout life.

Every spread invites readers to pause their journey through the book for contemplation and consideration of their personal paths, sometimes those past, sometimes present, and possible future ones too. With a final portrayal of a grandmother reflecting on her life, there’s such wealth of pattern, texture and stories aplenty at each page turn, this is a book to return to over and over with new understanding and perhaps different questions emerging from each read.