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We often get asked for recommendations for a particular age of a child so this month’s book list is by the Gecko Press team recommending our top picks from our shelves to help with your gift buying this season.

The taonga of a school library is hard to get back— it is not a piece of paper to be slid into a file. It is a precious space that needs our protection, our care, our aroha and our strength to protect it or maybe it will be filed away forever, lost.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

In my learning support classroom, I have a growing list of ‘go-to’ picture books and early readers that have proven popular with my students with dyslexia over the years. 

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.

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.

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.