Curiously Good Book Club, On the blog

Rain like a thunderstorm — the My Happy Life series wraps up

The My Happy Life chapter book series is one of the most acclaimed and loved we’ve published at Gecko Press. The books have attached themselves firmly to many of us working with them over the years, so as booksellers, publishers and designers, we asked ourselves what we’ve enjoyed most about My Happy Life.

Curiously Good Book Club, On the blog

Egg & Spoon: Author Alexandra Tylee interviews Illustrator Giselle Clarkson

I had a note by my computer screen with the colours from the brief: red, pink, summer orange, gold, paperbag brown, no black. The colours make a feeling and you take that feeling and turn it into a picture.

And they’re delicious colours. They make food look good. 

Curiously Good Book Club, On the blog

Egg & Spoon: Illustrator Giselle Clarkson interviews Author Alexandra Tylee

In the introduction for the book, you’ve written that if Pipi was a cake, she would be this glorious towering sponge cake. If you were a cake, what would you be? 

If I was a cake, I love the idea of a tall wobbly sponge and defying all odds.

Q&As

Timeline Science and Technology: Q&A with Peter Goes

I wanted to make an up-to-date version of a timeline because at school, timelines helped me a great deal to understand history. Those simple lines with dates and pictures gave me a better overview and understanding of history than text. It is a way to create order in a sometimes-chaotic string of events. It helps you see similarities, influences and coincidences.

Curiously Good Book Club, On the blog

Day in the life of Anete Melece

Anete Melece is a Latvian author and illustrator. On Wednesday 23rd September she took over the Gecko Press Instagram account to share her journey of becoming a freelance illustrator, how she created The Kiosk, and what she is working on now.

Book Lists

Book list: Wordless picture books

I’d like to share some of my favourite wordless or silent picturebooks in the hope that this will encourage you to become familiar with silent books and their particular gifts.

Curiously Good Book Club

The Magic of Wordless Picture Books

Wordless picture books can be magical. With no text pulling our eyes away, adults and children can explore the pictures together, and together tell the story.

Q&As

Migrants: Q&A with Issa Watanabe

Issa Watanabe was born in Peru, the daughter of an illustrator and a poet.

Migrants is a vital and powerful wordless picture book of courage, loss and hope—the definitive story of what it takes to migrate to a new land. 

Curiously Good Book Club

Adding your own story to Mihi

Mihi is Gavin Bishop’s beautiful new baby book that introduces ideas of me and my place in the world in the shape of a simple mihi or pepeha.

Gavin Bishop shares his mihi and how you can you the book Mihi to guide you to create your own.

Curiously Good Book Club

How Gavin Bishop discovered his whakapapa

Author and illustrator, Gavin Bishop, shares his story of how he discovered his family history, his ancestors, and his whānau.
“Finding this enormous whānau came about because of what my grandfather had taken care to do in 1918. When he gave his youngest daughter, my mother, “all the names” he also gave her her whakapapa.”