The New York Times loves our new children’s board books
The paper devotes half of its children's books coverage to our new titles A Pile of Leaves and Hug This Book!
We don’t publish many books with exclamation marks in the title, but Hug This Book! is a worthy exception. This lovable book for kids – just reformatted as a board book – is an adventurous call-to-action for both infant bibliophiles and their parents. And it's going down well with reviewers too!
"The new board book version is a clear winner, inviting touch and placing the youngest readers right in the middle of the action, in a familiar location,” writes the New York Times’ Cailtlin Roper, who reviewed the books with her two pre-school children in the paper at the weekend, devoting almost half the Times’ kids’ book coverage to Phaidon titles.
“’You can kiss and hug and smell this book’ elicited tiny smooching sounds from my daughter, while my son leaned in close and sniffed it,” she writes. “The sketchy, energetic illustrations in a limited but bright palette charmed us all.”
That wasn’t the only board book that went down well with the Roper family. Cailtlin and her kids also loved A Pile of Leaves, our colourful, collage-inspired book with see-through pages, by the artist couple Tamara Shopsin and Jason Fulford.
“Each surprisingly sturdy plastic page shows a layer: a leaf or two, an acorn, ants and a leaf, a grasshopper and two leaves. Then, under that top layer are lost objects — a mitten, a key — the kinds of things that might be misplaced during a romp through a pile of leaves,” writes Roper. “My kids and I paged through the book once, silently. Then we started over and talked through it, discussing leaves and piles and missing objects. ‘It’s like digging through a toy basket for a missing piece,’ my son said.” Now there's a young book reviewer in waiting!
To read the full reviews go here; to buy a copy of Hug This Book! go here, and to order a copy of A Pile of Leaves go here.