When I look back at the last years of my life, years in which I have one or two children in charge, in many scenes there is an Oliver Jeffers book in our hands. Today I want to tell you how we got to this writer - illustrator.
Martín was a year old, a little brunette with bushy eyebrows and long black hair. And her godmother, Naty Villa, arrived with a gift that became pure possibilities, a gift that continues to work magic today. There were three short and illustrated stories, in a beautiful little box from which on one side you could see a child taking off in a rocket and on the other side the same child and a penguin riding an umbrella in the middle of the sea.
Once upon a time there was a boy... A boy who traveled to the moon and met a Martian, who traveled to the South Pole with his friend the penguin and who jumped until he got tired to catch a star. All of these adventures happen in the stories: Homecoming, Lost and Found, and How to Catch a Star.
I have lost count of the times we have read these three. Infinite in these last 13 years and multiplied when Vicente came into our lives. But, by then, the crayons were also sending us letters on: The day the crayons quit.
Oliver Jeffers became the door to children's literature , the window to reading, the key to the complicity that is created between a child who already knows that story time is coming and an adult who chooses the best of the best for that moment.
We keep track of him. We wanted to know more about that boy and all the characters that came out of Jeffers' pencil. This is how we celebrated the arrival of Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth , which accompanied us in the early days of Vicente.
I share a fragment full of tenderness, in which Martín reads this book to his younger brother, Vicente, and makes his own explanations. So that you, like us, fall in love with this author that you can find in our Tintea store and of course in the library closest to your home.