Gecko Press Blog

For our new series, The Books that Raised Me, we talked to the School Library Association of New Zealand to discover the books that raised the librarians of SLANZA.

We are celebrating Pride 2021 with a list of children’s books featuring LGBTQ+ characters from Phoebe Wilton-Stuart of Wardini Books.

We are very pleased to announce that three Gecko Press books have been shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.

Anke Kuhl shows us how she brought the weird and wonderful animal kingdom to life in Do Animals Fall in Love?

For this month’s book list we asked some parents in the book world what bedtime favourites their children ask for again and again. Jane Arthur, manager at Good Books, Wellington, poet and mother of Pete We’ve somehow ended up with two identical copies of Peter Gossage’s How Maui Slowed the Sun in board book format,… Read more »

The image of the small girl and the big dinosaur, the idea that something could be so gigantic, struck my young mind. I still remember the feeling back then of my heart pounding fast. Since then, I have become addicted to reading about these worlds that are far away in time or space but real to me.

The books we read and remember as a child really do the heavy lifting of raising us as a reader.  These are some of the books that raised me.

Once the connection has been made, for it to stay alive, there need to be more books, more nudges from more people, and they need to be meaningful to what that particular child needs at that particular moment.

Catharina Valckx takes us to her studio in Amsterdam and shows us how she created the charming Lisette in Lisette’s Green Sock.

This book is completely autobiographical. It tells of my son’s first year and my first year of being a mother. It is a book I wrote so I wouldn’t forget that year and also to try to convey what I experienced when discovering motherhood.