Just So Stories

Ford St Publishing

September 2024

ISBN 9781922696427

RRP: $17.99

Some days are just too much… for any of us, let alone Smalls. And it’s not always big stuff that makes them so. Often, it’s more like one not-so-big thing after another until they all roll into one huge dump of misery.

As adults most of us have learned ways to debrief from days like this, but our kiddos are still finding their way. This is one of the reasons the specific and directed teaching in emotional intelligence (Personal and Social Capability) is crucial.

Children in today’s society, no matter which geographical location, social strata, ethnicity/cultural or socio-economic status are all exposed to far more major stresses than we realise. And with many of them protected and even ‘helicoptered’, more and more we, as educators, are finding these little people coming to school, completely unprepared to deal with any kind of setbacks, with no resilience and certainly no strategies for dealing with problems and disappointments.

Books such as Zoom, which explore the concept of reevaluating events or circumstances putting these into a different perspective and reflecting on them within a bigger context ,are an important, indeed vital, tool for couching these strategies in an accessible way for all children.

Tom has had a horrible day at school, where it seemed that nothing went right for him. While a storm gathers outside, his own personal storm comes rushing out. Luckily, he has a wise mother who gently uses the analogy of zooming with a camera to look at a different aspect of each situation.

Given Tom is familiar with the photographic technique, thanks to his grandfather, he gradually comes to see that those smaller upsets do not tell the whole story. His perspective widens and he begins to reframe his day into one in which he can find the glimmers.

Dannika has created a text that perfectly outlines this conversation between parent and child as the one helps the other to find this new perspective and Ross Morgan’s illustrations are, as always, almost magical as he deftly uses light and dark, and a subtly changing palette to add meaningful depth to the narrative. The cover image does not do credit to the reality, so a quick snap to try to convey the gorgeous foiled title hopefully might go someway to doing so.

It is in one sense, a relatively simple story, but the power of its meaning and the advantage to using it with either one’s own child or a room full of them is boundless. I’m giving this one a very big 5 📷📷📷📷📷 rating – lovely work from both creators, and another wonderful title from Ford St.