Wolves

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Part of my 365 Kids Books challenge. For a fuller explanation see my review for 101 Amazing Facts about Australia You can see all the books on their own shelf. LoveReading4Kids exists because books change lives, and buying books through LoveReading4Kids means you get to change the lives of future generations, with 25% of the cover price donated to schools in need. Join our community to get personalised book suggestions, extracts straight to your inbox, 10% off RRPs, and to change children’s lives. After leaving school at 16, Emily Gravett went on the road, living in a 30-foot bus with her partner, Mik. They became part of a community of “travellers” for nearly 10 years, living an unpredictable subsistence life. Then they had a daughter, Oleander, who loved being read to but made it hard for her parents to continue living the traveller life. The young family moved to a cottage in rural Wales, where Gravett started to draw. She only began producing children’s picture books eight years ago, when she enrolled on an art course at Brighton University.

BUT, the whole time I kept thinking... okay, surely we are going to learn some NICE facts about wolves. And, surely we are going to see that wolves are not the horrible, evil, murderous monsters that are portrayed in the rabbit's imagination (and in the illustrations). Surely that will be the "moral" of this story. Well, no. The surprise ending and the "alternate happy ending" do nothing to promote a positive view of wolves. a b c d e f g h "Emily Gravett: Kate Greenaway Medal Winner 2005". Press release 7 July 2006. CILIP. Retrieved 2012-12-01. As rabbit walks along while reading, oblivious to its surroundings, the young reader sees that the grass is actually a wolf’s fur; rabbit is coming to the end of wolf’s snout, and wolf is holding cutlery. There are allusions here to The Gingerbread Man. Earlier, the wolf in a hood is reminiscent of Little Red Riding Hood. In fact, the whole story relies on the classic fairytale idea that rabbits are cute and good; wolves are evil and sneaky and bad.Emily Gravett's colourful yet sparse illustrations cleverly depict a bumbling bear interacting in many different and imaginative ways with the fruit mentioned in the title.

I write and illustrate both of my books and I think actually it’s easier that way cause I’ve never actually really illustrated for anyone else so I don’t know how people managed, but I think really when you’re writing a picture book, you have to have both — the pictures and the words are equally as important. My Dad’s a printmaker and he still is a printmaker. My Mom was an art teacher. She’s retired now. So when I was growing up, there was always lots of art materials around the house and they were always really encouraging about drawing, especially my Dad.Despite having read hundreds of picture books with my (then) small daughter, I was still slightly woolly on picture book conventions such as, length/endpapers/format etc. Because I didn’t know, I didn’t worry about it! I didn’t have time to think up a “story” so I decided to base my book on a list of facts about wolves. It made perfect sense to me that rabbits would be the keenest readers on that subject, so I decided that a rabbit would borrow (burrow) a book from the library and we would read along with him