Just Like You Publishes Today with Otter-Barry Books!!

Its such an exciting day when the book you've been working on gets released into the world!

It is also terrifying! It's uncanny that amongst all the beautiful, thoughtful reviews, you can't help but be saddened by the less complimentary ones! I try to avoid looking too much. What I can say is that I make my work from my heart and I truly hope that my stories/poems are thought provoking, none more so than Just Like You which publishes today with Otter-Barry Books.

Just Like You was a project that was started whilst studying for my MA in Children's Book Illustration at Cambridge School of Art. I wrote it in 2016, so it's been a long time coming to publication. In the very early stages of the project I became interested in the way children point to their eyes, noses, ears etc, when asked, their beautiful clumsiness is so appealing and wonderful to draw.

It was around the time that that amazing Beatrice Alemagna's book What is a Child? came to my attention and this influenced me greatly. Gradually the storyline for Just Like You, which is about a refugee family, came to me. Originally, the main character was a boy and the story was perhaps a little more hard-hitting in its content and illustrative style.

The main character is a little girl who points out her features like children do: I've got two eyes; I've got two ears etc. It isn't until the very end that we see that the child is in fact, a refugee. I will do further blog posts about this at a later date as I don't want to rattle on too much right now, and I'm going to attach a video about the making and background of the story.

If you would like to purchase Just Like You, you can do so here.

Thanks for visiting!

Jo x