Over the Shop

Description

Over the Shop

JonArno Lawson, illustrated by Qin Leng

(Walker Books)– hardback

Over the Shop is a girl who awakens every day to wash her face, before breakfast and washing the dishes. Meanwhile her grandmother, it appears prepares the shop for the day ahead.

When we meet them, the girl’s grandmother has shooed away the cat that lives in a box in the alley. Thereafter, she’s begun making a sign offering a Flat to Rent. While she’s busy, her granddaughter prepares some silent food for the forbidden cat.

We watch as a trail of people trek up the stairs to the flat, sparse, dirty, abandoned. We recognise the same sense of disrepair and savage absence of comfort in the shop and lives of the grandmother and granddaughter.

Yet, what might happen should a couple stop and see the potential of this little flat? Furthermore, maybe they recognise something in the girl who follows them with a broom, obviously desperate for life, warmth, colour, hope and opportunity?

Bookwagon adores Over the Shop. This wordless picture book offers so much in terms of understanding, inference, warmth and encouragement. Canadian poet and writer JonArno Lawson is best known to readers for Aloud in My Head. Now he turns his intricate plotting and storytelling skills to a wordless picture book, relayed in such sympathetic tones and perspective by Qin Leng.