Sidewalk Flowers

"This is another apparently very simple story, of a little girl walking home with her father. He is very distracted and is just talking on his phone while she is noticing and picking up the flowers in the pavement, the little flowers that some people would call weeds. She’s being attentive as she walks, she notices the flowers and she also notices other things, like a dead bird, and she gives it a flower, and a homeless man, a dog… She starts distributing the flowers that she has collected, and as she does so, the pages change colour. They begin to go from black, white and grey to colourful. So she is illuminating, really, the places where she goes through these flowers. It’s about love and attention and caring for someone else and spending a little bit of time with a dog or looking at the bird. There’s also that self-love at the end where she puts a flower in her hair. Exactly. And the end papers change from just the flowers to her being in the flower field. All of those things, if you look at the book too quickly, you don’t notice, but there are many layers of meaning there. Not everyone will access all those layers, but they are there for the reader to explore. Yes. JonArno Lawson is a poet and he has his own books that are with words. He and the illustrator speak about that collaboration as almost illustrating a poem that doesn’t exist, but it is still a very poetic book. Yes, he won it last year. I was also on the jury last year, so you can see he is also one of my favourites."