30 New Zealand Stories for Children

Description

Title: 30 New Zealand Stories for Children
Editor: Jo Noble
Illustrations: David Elliot
Publisher: Random House New Zealand, 2000
Format: Hardback
Condition: Very Good – no dusk jacket

Description:

Pavlovas and chocolate bombs. Farms and zoos. Cricket and rugby. Witches’ britches and winning Lotto.

30 New Zealand Stories for Children is exactly what it promises: thirty stories written by some of the best children’s authors this country has produced, gathered together in a handsome hardback and sent out to entertain the 7 to 10 year olds of New Zealand and the grown-ups who read to them.

Joy Cowley is here. Margaret Mahy is here (“Green marmalade to you”). Jack Lasenby contributes two Uncle Trev stories — if you know, you know, and if you don’t, this is an excellent place to start. Patricia Grace. David Hill. Diana Noonan. Jane Buxton. These are not random names pulled together by a publisher looking for content; they are the writers who built NZ children’s literature over four decades, collected in a single volume by Jo Noble, the co-owner of Auckland’s Jabberwocky Bookshop and one of the most knowledgeable champions of NZ children’s books the country has had.

The illustrations throughout are by David Elliot, who had already won the Honour Award at the NZ Post Book Awards for Sydney and the Sea Monster by the time this was published, and who went on to win the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year in 2017. His creatures are expressive, strange, and perfectly matched to the book’s tone.

This is a read-aloud book as much as a read-alone book. The stories are short, the humour is recognisably NZ, and the whole thing sits well in a classroom basket or on a shelf between longer chapter books.

Why We Stock It:

NZ children’s literature from 2000, with a roll call of authors any NZ parent or teacher would recognise. Out of print. The kind of hardback that passes from one set of children to the next and gets better with each reading.