Out By Angela May George and Owen Swan, Scholastic Press, 2016. I’m called an asylum seeker, but that’s not my name. Out is the moving story of a little girl and her mother who have fled from danger in their homeland. They travel by boat on a long and perilous journey to seek asylum in a new and safe land. This story is timely and celebrates how the human spirit can triumph even through the darkest times. The little girl and her mother build a new life and await the arrival of the little girl’s father at the end of the story. Awards Shortlisted: The Picture Book of the Year by Children’s Book Council of Australia, 2017.

My Two Blankets By Irena Kobald and Freya Blackwood, Little Hare, 2014. ‘Cartwheel has moved to a place that is so strange to her, she no longer feels like herself. This is a story about new ways of speaking, new ways of living, new ways of being.’ In My Two Blankets, we travel with Cartwheel across countries to a new world far from the world she grew up in and is familiar with. She feels isolated and alone, and goes home and hides under her old blanket, where she feels safe. She mentions that when she went out, it felt like she was ‘standing under a waterfall of strange sounds. The waterfall was cold. It made me feel alone.’ Her old blanket is adorned with familiar objects from her homeland. Then, one day when she is in the park, she makes a friend. Her new friend begins to teach her new words, and as Cartwheel grapples with her new language, she doesn’t feel so much like she is under a waterfall anymore. She soon begins to weave herself a new blanket encapsulating the words and images of her newfound language. And, as she learned the new words she ‘whispered them…