Picture books aren’t just for kids.
Hope is the Thing is more a work of art than a book. It’s a cry of pain in response to the devastation of the 2019/20 bushfires but also a rallying cry of hope to see all the goodness and wonder in the world around us. It’s a book that will appeal to poets, artists and nature lovers.
Although this book won the New Illustrator Award in the CBCA Book of the Year Awards, it’s not the work of a total newbie. Erica Wagner is a stalwart of the children’s book publishing industry, but it takes guts to make the move from publisher to creator and this is a brave book.
Erica Wagner’s poignant collages, created from scraps of books and artworks are the perfect medium for a work that combines the ethereal qualities of flight and birdsong with everyday scenes of seagulls stealing hot chips and ibis’ scrounging scraps of food from bins.
Hope is all around us in the instinct for survival, but equally in the impulse to create art from pain.
-Katrina Roe, RRL
