Tag Emily Hibbs

Zizzi Moonbeam

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Zizzi Moonbeam
Emily Hibbs and Natalie Smillie
Little Tiger

It’s Zizzi Moonbeam’s first day as an official party planner at Fairy HQ and she’s fizzing with excitement!. Having made her way to the Party Planners floor, she’s greeted by chief party planner Elvina Glass who hands her the day’s assignments.

Anxious to impress, Zizzi turns down the offer of help from Caspar who is seated next to her and sets to work by herself. She wizzes to the rescue to make sure every party is successful despite there being in turn, rain on the day of a garden party, a bridesmaid’s dress spattered all over with jam

and an ice-cream shop whose owner has forgotten to send out the invitations to its grand opening.

Seemingly no problem is unsolvable when it comes to Zizzi; but just before she’s due to go home she discovers another letter. How could she have overlooked it? There’s definitely not sufficient time to solve this party problem alone. Finally Zizzi realises she needs to act on Elvira’s advice and see if one of her new friends can come to her aid and save the day. Perhaps teamwork will become dreamwork of a very special kind.

Young listeners, party fans in particular, will love Emily Hibbs’ enchanting story and Natalie Smilie’s richly detailed scenes with their letters to open, books to consult, as well as the spreads showing the outcomes of Zizzi’s magical interventions.

Who Owns the Woods? / Above and Below: Sea and Shore

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Here are two recent picture books about the natural world from Little Tiger – thanks to the publishers for sending them for review.

Who Owns the Woods?
Emily Hibbs and Jess Mason

A boy and his grandma go exploring in the woods and as they walk, the child asks ‘who owns’ various natural things. Could it be one of the tiny animals they stop to observe – the spiders spinning their webs perhaps, or the butterflies with their beautifully patterned wings. 

Perhaps the woods belong to the magnificent stag, a fox or … maybe the boy himself is the owner of all those magnificent trees.

Not so, says his wise grandma; nobody can claim ownership of this particular area of woodland forest with its wealth of awe-inspiring flora and fauna; it is there for the enjoyment of every single person and moreover, as the boy himself confirms, it needs to be shown respect and treated with care.

What is needed is stewardship not ownership; that is the key message in this book beautifully illustrated by Jess Mason. Her scenes truly evoke the magic and tranquility of these special places. I really like the way the branches of the trees speak to readers serving to re-inforce the all important theme of Emily’s Hibb’s text.

Above and Below: Sea and Shore
Harriet Evans and Hannah Bailey

Now published in paperback, this is one of an excellent spilt page, lift-the-flap natural history series; it explores ocean habitats below and above the waves taking readers to such locations as the coastline, a sub-aquatic kelp forest, polar oceans and an estuary. There’s a visit to a tropical shore, a coral reef, a mangrove swamp and more.

The information comes in bite-sized portions making it accessible to EYFS and KS1 audiences. Children will be fascinated to discover that for instance, a lobster tastes with its legs and has teeth in its stomach and that in the forests of a mangrove swamp is a grey-headed flying fox with a wingspan of 1.5 metres, making it one of the world’s largest bat species.

The spilt pages work well providing as the title indicates, above and below views of the locations featured, each being beautifully illustrated with lots of detail: there’s so much to see.

This is a book that celebrates the natural world and gives a real sense of the sheer diversity of life in our oceans and rivers and on our shores.

Tales from the Forest

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Tales from the Forest
Emily Hibbs, illustrated by Erin Brown
Stripes Publishing

This collection of twenty stories – five for each season – takes readers close up to creatures great and small from various habitats in the forest.

There’s a wishful caterpillar discovering its own metamorphosis, an adder that sheds its beautiful patterned scaly skin and the woodpeckers searching for a new tree in which to nest and rear chicks in spring.

Bees busy performing their various roles in and around their hive;

fireflies lighting up the forest at twilight “The stars of the forest, burning bright”; competitive boars that end up wallowing side by side in the mud; bats, and tadpoles turning into frogs,

we meet them all in summertime.

Autumn presents beavers building a dam; the subterranean mole; a little mouse that has a narrow escape from a marauding hawk to tiny ladybird ready to join its fellows huddling close inside a log and a fawn whose spots vanish and his antlers grow.

In chilly winter Spider’s new web holds her pouch of tiny eggs while she finds a warmer place to spend her days till spring;

Black Wolf finds a white female companion to share his days; Squirrel remembers where she’s stashed her nuts; a little fox and his siblings lose their way and finally, an owlet listens to the sounds of the other forest animals before she and her father add their own voice to the nocturnal song.

Amazing animals all, as the author acknowledges in her final factual paragraphs – one each for the twenty featured. Her stories are packed with detailed, description and information in a highly accessible form so that readers/listeners will come away from each one having learned a lot without realising it. And, each story ends with a 4-line verse.

Erin Brown’s finely detailed, painterly illustrations at every turn of the page are an absolute delight adding further atmosphere and detail to each telling.