Gecko Press Blog

Reading books from around the world expands our thinking. Yet international titles make up only a small percentage of books on the shelves of children…

Currently, my mind-expanding travels take place on the pages of a different type of passport — the picture book. Here, both pictures and words offer a chance to travel without a plane ticket, to a new world, be it real or imagined. A picture book offers a round trip to the imagination, and these days, that’s my dream destination.

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.