Family - General & Miscellaneous, Fiction - General & Miscellaneous, Brothers & Sisters, Poetry - Family Life

Olly and Me

Name: Olly and Me
Author: Shirley Hughes
ISBN: 9780763623746

by Shirley Hughes

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Overview

With typically charming realism, Shirley Hughes illustrates a special sibling bond that small children will find reassuringly familiar.

A visit to the library, making pancakes with Dad, slooshing with water in the yard — in this collection of poems and anecdotes, a young girl named Katie tells of her family and friends and the everyday moments that make up her world. Most especially, there is Olly, her little brother, who does many things with Katie and, to her chagrin, even tries to join in when she’s doing ballet. From the acclaimed author-illustrator of ANNIE ROSE IS MY LITTLE SISTER comes another endearing ode to a brother-and-sister pair.

Olly and his big sister have a good time together, whether dancing, walking in the park with their parents, or playing with friends.

About the Author, Shirley Hughes

Shirley Hughes has illustrated more than two hundred children’s books and is renowned as a champion of children’s literature. She has been the recipient of the Kate Greenaway Medal and the Eleanor Farjeon Award, and in 1999 she was honored with an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) for her distinguished services to children’s literature. About children’s books, she says, "The stories and pictures we take to our hearts as children remain with us always." Shirley Hughes lives in London.

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Editorials

Children's Literature

Hughes has created another set of her lively, very appealing real children, along with their parents and friends. They are busy with their everyday activities like visiting the library, the park, the museum, shopping, enjoying fireworks, and celebrating mother's birthday. Each episode, in verse or anecdote form, is only a page or two, but manages to capture the experience through the eyes of a child. "Warm in bed/Under the covers." Doing ballet, in "special pink dancing shoes and white tights and a sticking-out skirt," with little brother Olly trying to join in. "Filling buckets...making rivers and dams..." Their lives are filled with simple joys. Hughes continues to demonstrate her sensitive vision along with her ability to use gouache color and oil pastels to create full-page scenes and vignettes that tell ordinary anecdotes of childhood in particularly humanistic ways. Her illustrations are not sentimental but are immediately appealing. 2004, Candlewick Press, Ages 3 to 6.
—Ken Marantz and Sylvia Marantz

School Library Journal

PreS-Gr 3-Through this warm and cozy collection of illustrated poems, a youngster's world is brought into focus. Readers meet the exuberant Katie and follow her interactions with her family and her friends throughout the year. Besides her parents and baby brother, Olly, there is her dog, Buster; Betty the sheep; her neighbor's cat; and Grandma's cat, Queenie. "But no cat-no cat-is as nice as our cat, Ginger." Fully realized vignettes capture Katie's ballet class, Dad making pancakes, Saturday shopping, watching fireworks, and visiting a Natural History Museum. Expressive gouache and oil pastels, full of realistic and child-centered detail, portray this loving, busy family as they go about their daily lives. This book is great for nightly sharing or for independent readers to enjoy as a chapter book. Either way, it's a treat.-Wanda Meyers-Hines, Ridgecrest Elementary School, Huntsville, AL Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

In what amounts to a companion for Annie Rose Is My Little Sister (2003), the doyenne of cozy domesticity offers a warm slice-of-life portrait of another brother-sister combo, this time with the unnamed sister doting over her toddler brother. Hughes depicts the preschool-age narrator and her sibling as chubby-limbed, curly-topped children in familiar surroundings. Switching back and forth between prose and verse, she expertly varies the pace and language to capture each episode's feel: the pleasure of visiting a favorite sheep at a petting zoo; a lazy day "Splishing and Splashing" in the yard, "making mud, / Making rivers and dams / And swimming pools for ants," peering at pond fish "suddenly diving / with a brisk whisk of their tails," eagerly anticipating Mom's birthday party. The narrator may not sound her age, but her observations beg to be read aloud, and it's the mutual affection, the shared joy of ordinary family activities that will make the strongest impression on young listeners. (Picture book/poetry. 4-7)