COLLABORATIONS WITH ARTIST JACQUI COLLEY

Available from Allen & Unwin

‘The clubs epidemic breaks out in March like a giant nit plague. It spreads through our class ‘til practically everyone’s infected. Not me. I must be inoculated.’

Lolly has a divine teacher called Ms Love. She has a cat called Laughing Stock but he won’t qualify her for membership of the Kitten Club. The Harry Potter Club excludes girls, the Lego Club’s too violent and she’s disdainful of the Barbie Club beauty contests. In this story Lolly narrates her search for a Club to truly belong to.

AWARDS

Book of the Year & Picture Book of the Year
NZ Post Book Awards 2005: 

LIANZA Russell Clark Award for Illustration

Spectrum Print Award for Typography.

“Both in terms of its text and illustration this book is a breakthrough in New Zealand publishing. Original, funny, demanding to a degree, and achieving a true marriage of text and image...
There are lots of wonderful stories with pictures, but this is a picture book in the truest sense ofthe word.’
Margaret Mahy

“What sustains and deepens the narrative, even more than De Goldi’s skill in language and characterisation are Colley’s collage illustrations utilising pencil, crayons and mixed media and which are modelled on children’s own creative techniques. Their skewed and strategic placements force the reader/viewer to explore multitudinous micro-fictions, reading and re-reading the words as art and the art as words.”
Bill Nagelkerke, Magpies

‘In a class of its own, Clubs is one of the most significant New Zealand picture books of the past 10 years.’ 
Dylan Owen, The Dominion Post

Available from Allen & Unwin

Billy Button, one of Lolly’s classmates from Room 7, can’t keep his mouth shut or his emotions under control. It makes preparation for the annual Pet and Produce Day a nightmare. Not only that: Room 7 is full of over-achievers, teacher’s pets and anarchists – and worse, Billy has to wrestle with the community judges’ arcane and endless rigid rules. Billy’s imagination and his Pet and Produce Day projects run riot, and so do the events of A & P Day – just the way Ms Love likes things to go: ‘not with a whimper, but a bang!’

“Billy is a true picture book, it’s the best picture book I’ve seen for a long time. Billy is a perfect combination of pictures and words, with that very special space nbetween the two. Billy is a work of Art, a thing of Beauty that’s both funny and touching. Every school has a Billy - I wish every school had a Ms. Love.” 
Anthony Browne

When Uncle Jack appears everything happens. On Fridays he arrives in his pork-pie hat and gumboots ready for fish ’n’ chips and adventure. He is Peter Pan, Robin Hook and Attila the Honey. He’s a story-teller, a collector, a trickster, an adventurer and a magician - The Great Jackarooney. 

Uncle Jack is an anarchic and unexpected celebration of a child’s imagination. Uncle Jack and his friends invent fabulous worlds, indulge their passions, and revel in the intimate rituals of family life.     

Uncle Jack is about the worlds children create. The story plays with the language, imagery and memories of children’s literature and the riotous nature of children’s imaginations. Like the text, the drawings are layered and evocative.  They follow Uncle Jack as he experiments with the mysterious, the sinister, and a return to the comforts of the familiar. Uncle Jack offers children and their parents the delights of the arcane, a bit of a scare and an occasion to celebrate what it means to be an individual.

“Uncle Jack is a celebration of boyhood, full of laughter, tears, and understanding, and, while immensely particular to one, it’s a paean of joy and affection for all boys.  It’s a remarkable book, and I’m delighted to see it’s the first in a series.  I count myself lucky to be alive here and now, waiting for the next!”
Jack Lasenby

Uncle Jack is an entirely different proposition to Clubs which was vibrant and colourful. This is the first in the Manila series (named for the artwork in black and white paint on manila paper). The effect is shadowy and eerie, the images not quite clear. They remind you of something familiar but you can’t quite put your finger on it. Is that the Mad Hatter? The three little pigs? The characters are like ghosts of what we already know.

This is most certainly not an easy picture book. It is not the sort of book you pick up for a quick read-through. This book takes a lot of thought, a lot of looking, and a lot of discussion, and therefore a lot of time and multiple readings.
Crissi Blair – Magpies