As I turned the last page on my first reading of A Child of Books by Sam Winston and Oliver Jeffers, I cried. Why? Well, the world of primary education can be a tricky place to inhabit, with change and accountability measures sometimes chipping away at the heart of what we do. We find ourselves chasing our tails, with so many plates to juggle and outcomes to achieve. And then comes a book like this, which stops you in your tracks and reminds you why you became a teacher in the first place.

A Child of Books takes us on a journey of celebration. Both of its makers describe it in just three words: ‘ode to literature’ and ‘world of words’. It is indeed both.

The story follows a confident little girl, our child of books, as she leads her friend on a journey through a world of stories. Along the way we are taken on a homage to children’s literature, as a myriad of genres are revealed across each spread, brought alive by typographic landscapes ingeniously created with the language of those classics.

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