Tag Eleanor Taylor

Early Years Christmas Books

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Maisy’s Christmas Letters
Lucy Cousins
Walker Books

Maisy is throwing a Christmas party and she’s been busy writing invitations to all her friends. It’s not long before the replies start coming in, along with other surprise items for Maisy such as a calendar(Eddie), a recipe (Cyril), a tiny joke book (Charley) and a special letter.
Interactive fun for little ones and just right to share in the run-up to Christmas. I suspect Maisy will acquire a host of new human friends with this book.

Marvin and Marigold: A Christmas Surprise
Mark Carthew and Simon Prescott
New Frontier Publishing

Thanks to a surprise gift from her mother on the first of December, and her own thoughtfulness, Marigold Mouse is able to bring Christmas happiness to her best friend Marvin.
Mark Carthew’s lively rhyming narrative and Simon Prescott’s expressive illustrations together make for a warm-hearted seasonal story in the Marvin and Marigold series reminding us all that Christmas is for sharing with others.

Winnie the Pooh: The Long Winter Sleep
Jane Riordan, Eleanor Taylor and Mikki Butterley
Egmont

Who or what is making those Scritch! Scratch! Crunch! sounds as Pooh and his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood bed down for their long winter sleep, shutting out the cold wind blowing through the Forest? One after another the animals venture out into the darkness in the hopes of discovering the source of the weird noises. What they find comes as a wonderful surprise that warms them both outside and inside.

Jane Riordan succeeds in capturing the essence of Milne’s characters in this charming tale while the illustrators give a slightly carton feel to the artwork.
Also in the same series but in a mini edition:

A Pudding for Christmas
The friends all gather to make a Christmas pudding, “A gigantic delicious pudding as big as Pooh,” announces Christopher Robin. Each in turn adds an ingredient to the mix and then one by one they stir the pudding and make a wish until Kanga realises that Roo is missing. Is he or is he not somewhere in the pudding? It’s probably a good idea to defer cooking it – just in case …
Another enchanting episode for tinies, this pocket sized book would make a good stocking filler.

Vegetables in Holiday Underwear
Jared Chapman
Abrams Appleseed

The eagerly anticipated season of holiday underwear has arrived and there’s seasonal excitement in veggie land. So says the green pea announcer at the start of the latest in Jared Chapman’s zany series.

Readers are then treated to a pants extravaganza that displays underwear of the cosy and scratchy kinds, that to wear inside and outside; to accommodate the Christmas meal there are stretchy pants as well as the inevitable tight pair. Some pants are similar while others are utterly unique. And because it’s Christmas even Santa is suitably ‘panted. Festive silliness for sure.

A Year in Nature / My First Pop-Up Dinosaurs

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A Year in Nature
Hazel Maskell and Eleanor Taylor
Laurence King Publishing

Subtitled ‘a carousel book of the seasons’, this opens out into a four-part carousel that is sure to engage and impress.
Detailed scenes of a woodland in spring, summer, autumn and winter leap out from finely cut out pages revealing the glories of each season.

These woods are home to a family of foxes and we share the growth of the tiny cubs over a year as they explore their surroundings.
In spring there are nesting birds in the branches of the trees and new life begins everywhere.
Come summer, visiting birds have arrived; there’s an abundance of butterflies recently emerged, as well as bees, dragonflies and grasshoppers to find.

By autumn the young foxes are almost full-grown; now they hunt for their own food among the fungi under the golden brown canopy while squirrels are busy overhead gathering nuts to store.

Winter sees many of the trees without any leaves but berries still add brightness to the forest-scape.

Eleanor Taylor’s lush artwork is absorbing, bringing a place of beauty to life – the next best thing to visiting a forest for real, and Hazel Maskell provides brief snippets of information that are set among the forest branches along with things to hunt for in each scene.

This book would look great as part of a display in schools, no matter the season and would also make a great gift for a young child, particularly an urban living one.

My First Pop-Up Dinosaurs
Owen Davey
Walker Books

Thanks to David Hawcock’s amazing paper-engineering, Owen Davey’s prehistoric creatures literally leap back into life as you open the pages of this sturdy little book. Showcasing fifteen popular and less well known beasts from Pachycephalosaurus to Pterodactylus, Ichthyosaurus to Iguanodon and Ankylosaurus to Tyrannosaurus,

Davey’s illustrations with their designs of spots, splodges and stripes are arresting in their greys, tans, browns, greens and blues.

A smashing introduction to the world of dinosaurs, with the name and pronunciation of each provided for each one. Doubtless adult sharers will delight in the book almost as much as the young target audience of aspiring palaeontologists.

Secrets of the Sea

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Secrets of the Sea
Eleanor Taylor and Kate Baker
Big Picture Press

‘It is in the oceans that all life on Earth began, yet they are one of the least explored and least understood places on the planet.’ So writes Kate Baker in her introduction to this stunningly beautiful book that takes us from ‘In the Shallows’, through the ‘Forests of the Sea’and the ‘Coral Gardens’, into ‘The Wide, Wide Blue’ and down ‘Into the Deep’.
Venture beneath the waves and there’s an amazing variety of plant and animal life from single celled organisms such as ‘Sea sparkle’ …

to the Giant pacific octopus an enormous cephalopod that resides in the depth of the ocean and has an armspan of up to 4 metres. Not all octopus species are deep sea dwellers though: Coconut octopus is to be found in the shallows of tropical waters. This amazing creature is able, we’re told, to hide itself not only by changing its colour, texture and form to blend in with its surroundings, but also it can pick up an empty coconut shell, crawl inside and hide. Unsurprisingly it is considered the ‘master-mind’ of invertebrates.
Dive down to the kelp forests and discover minute algae and other fascinating creatures like this Hooded nudibranch:

The coal reefs are home to almost 25% of marine life much of which is brightly coloured such as these Pygmy seahorses …

It’s in the open oceans where such as the Sea angel can be found. This graceful dancer is a predatory sea slug, another deadly hunter …

Dive deeper and at depths of about 2000 metres are thriving communities of squat lobsters, white crabs, mussels, snake-like fish, anemones and these giant tube worms …

This is a book that opens the eyes to the staggering beauty of marine life in all its forms. Every illustration is a celebration of the wonders of the oceans and focuses on the intricate shapes, structures, patterns and colours that are revealed when the marine flora and fauna are examined in extreme close-up. Kate Baker’s accompanying text provides a broader picture describing habits and habitat of each organism and some basic facts including Latin name, size and other fascinating snippets of information.

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A Little Guide to Gardening

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A Little Guide to Gardening
Jo Elworthy and Eleanor Taylor
Eden Project
For this, the third ‘Little Guide to’ we have a new artist in Eleanor Taylor.
The chatty narrative opens with an introductory invitation ‘Imagine a special piece of earth where you can sow, plant and grow anything you like.‘ I can envisage some youngsters reading this and wanting to plant enormous exotic jungly gardens and others thinking of a patch of wild flowers, both of which are possible for the narration continues ‘A garden can be very big. A garden can be very small. A garden can be up high. A garden can be just for you. Or somewhere to share … You can make your garden here, there or anywhere. You don’t even need a flowerpot!’ Then, after a brief introduction to plants in general, Jo Elworthy takes readers through the seasons from spring to winter, talking about the changes through the year , listing jobs to do and suggesting activities. These are taken up in more detail later in the book when Eleanor Taylor’s delicate, winsome illustrations animate the step-by-step instructions and the wealth of other horticultural information …

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There’s much more besides though, including pages on some of the garden visitors – butterflies,

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birds and soil-dwelling creatures – all beautifully illustrated and each one a mini work of art in itself. So much to inspire young, potential gardeners: who wouldn’t want to make a den like this one?

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Or this one among the peas and beans?

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There are some delicious historical snippets such as ‘ROSEMARY Rosmarinus officinalis: Victorians put rosemary in the handles of their walking sticks. They used to sniff them thinking they kept diseases away.’

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And Dill – It was called ‘meeting house seed’ by the settlers in North America as children chewed it in sermons to stop them from feeling hungry. Goodness knows how long the sermons were then!

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Readers are also provided with blank pages at the back of the book to keep a seasonal record (I’d be hesitant to write in such a lovely book but that’s down to lucky owners to decide for themselves.) And there’s a tick list for recording plants grown.
The previous Little Guides – Little Guide to Trees and The Little Guide to Wild Flowers were illustrated by Charlotte Voake and this one maintains the high standard she set therein; indeed I notice the font used here is the one devised by Charlotte.
This is definitely one for the family bookshelf.

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