There are no limits to a child’s imagination. This picture book, with illustrations as delicate as fragile glass, shines a light on how expansive and powerful thoughts can be; how the imagination can transform the ordinary into extraordinary.

Siblings Daisy and Bear have ordinary days. It’s when their play becomes reality, everything changes. Their reflections confirm they are who they imagine to be.

One day they are in Paris, enjoying bagels and cake with friends outdoors on a rug. They return home flying with birds through fluffy clouds.

Another ordinary day sees them on an African safari, beneath trees, watching tigers lap at a pool of water.

They can be singers on a stage, with adoring fans surrounding them. Or dragon slayers with swinging swords on castle towers.

If they choose, Daisy and Bear can become artists preparing work for a museum display, or they can fly to the Moon to catch a star.

Another ordinary day is transformed when they become master chefs creating splendid tiered cakes, or divers, deep beneath the ocean.

There is one thing they love the best. It is at the end of the day, when sleep sweeps them into dreams, and they go on the best adventure of all.

Stunning fine line pencil Illustrations by Bianca Pozzi decorate the pages with Daisy and Bear’s imaginative excursions. At the end of the book, she shares her creative journal and her storyboard, so children can experience the making of a picture book.

Haylee Hackenberg shares private thoughts that gave birth to this beautiful book.

As in most, if not all Red Paper Kite books, there is a double spread image to be copied to colour. Here it is of Daisy and Bear with their parents. Exquisite end pages in pencil show the illustrator’s preparations of the characters.

Title: Daisy and Bear and the Very Ordinary Day
Author: Haylee Hackenberg
Illustrator: Bianca Pozzi
Publisher: Red Paper Kite, $25.00
Publication Date: 9 May 2021
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780648674290
For ages: 5+
Type: Picture Book

June 15, 2021 at 12:32PM Anastasia Gonis