Shortlisted for the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal 2010.
Touching and funny, this is also a visually sophisticated picture book which lightly carries an important message about the use – and misuse - of resources.
CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal SHORTLIST 2010: Judges’ comments
This is a brilliant whole production which makes wonderful use of colour, jacket and endpapers to convey an eco-message with a light touch. There are lots of witty little references and touches of humour to pick up on in this book which definitely rewards repeated re-reading.
also Shortlisted for the Bisto Irish Children's Book Award.
All is not well in the forest: branches of the trees keep disappearing and no one knows who has taken them. While searching for the culprit, the forest’s inhabitants turn accusingly on each other. Luckily they all have water-tight alibis so who can be carrying out the thefts? At last, they find the culprit. It is Bear who, in his desperation to win the paper aeroplane competition, gathers as much wood as possible and turns it all into paper….The delight for the readers is that they can follow what Bear is doing long before the truth is out.
Oliver Jeffers has won numerous awards and delighted millions of kids and parents alike with his beautifully hand illustrated stories.
Jeffers's picture books are wonderfully accessible. They explore themes of friendship, loneliness, independence and imagination. He has written and illustrated, or "made", as he prefers to put it, five hugely successful picture books. The first three - the "boy books" - feature a small boy who sets off on a series of daunting quests. How to Catch a Star (2004), the first of them, was inspired by a Brer Rabbit story he read as a child. In Lost and Found (2005) the boy heroically rows to the south pole for the sake of an unhappy penguin, and in The Way Back Home (2007) he rescues a young Martian whose spaceship has crashed on the moon.
The Heart and the Bottle is wholly compelling for the importance of its message and the brilliance of how that is conveyed in words and pictures. This is a book to return to time and time again says Julia Eccleshare, Lovereading4kids’ editorial expert.
Jeffers was born in Australia in 1977 and brought up in Belfast. He studied visual communication at the University of Ulster, and graduated in 2001. Jeffers became passionate about making picture books when he began to understand the subtle relationship between words and pictures – ‘that was what excited me. Until I got really involved, I hadn't realised how just a few words can totally change the meaning of a picture.’ Now living in New York, he works as a painter, designer, printmaker and installation artist, but remains very busy making picture books.
Did you know?
Oliver loves plastic food, suitcase handles and Elvis, and has developed a bizarre habit of endlessly writing lists he never reads. He remains hell bent on travelling all over the world.
You can see Oliver talking about his artwork in this video:
We have a super set of Oliver Jeffers activity pages to download :
