The illustrations are so beautiful.
This picture of Amelia riding on the whale's spout is my favourite.
But there's another reason she bought it for me. Amelia's father looks just like our dad! He loved sitting in his wing chair, he had glasses and he had that exact haircut.
Isn't it wonderful?
See those slippers? I swear my dad had a pair exactly like that. He wasn't the kind of man who would walk around the house barefoot, he was definitely a fan of slippers. Warm, slip-on slippers, just this these ones lived right next to his bed so that he could swing his legs out from under the warm covers in the morning and put his feet straight into them.
That could be me on the floor at his feet drawing a picture and dreaming of owning a dog. Except, I seem to recall that we were not allowed to have pencils and textas on the carpet so I would have been lying further away from the wing chair than in this picture. I would have been right at the edge of the carpet so that I could still lie where it was soft and warm but the paper I was drawing on could be on the floorboards. Oh yes, we'd figured out some work-arounds for our parent's strictest rules.However, I could well have been dreaming about getting a dog. We were pretty keen to get a pet at various stages of our childhood but mum and dad wouldn't hear of it. Dad had a dog when he was a boy, a puppy called Scooter, and he was so desperately upset when it was run over by a car that he didn't want us to go through that as well. So, apart from looking after the class pet for the holidays a couple of times we were a pet-free family.
The publishing details are below for anyone who is interested in finding out more.
