There are so many things to play with and things to share and do! Reach out and discover the world at your fingertips…
About
I thought it would be a really simple thing to write These are my Hands as a companion to These are my Feet. All I had to do was replace the word ‘feet’ with the word ‘hands’ and do a little tweaking right? How wrong I was.
Feet and hands are so different, and our relationship to them is so different. While Feet took about a day to write and design the illustrations, I think this book went through more drafts than it has words. Eventually I realised that These are my Feet is about space, about being in different places, but These are my Hands is actually about time. That was the narrative key I needed. From there the book developed to follow a small child through her day, with lots of different activities involving hands (as so many activities do).
The book finishes with the child asleep in bed hands cuddling her teddy bear – what more could anyone ask? I had a beloved teddy when I was a child, so I love the way this ended up.
These are my Hands is now available in a single back-to-back edition with These are my Feet, published by The National Library of Australia. Click here to see the new book.
Availability
Out of Print (can sometimes be found in secondhand bookshops and online)
Editions
Puffin Babies in Australia ISBN 978-01-43-50259-3 (Board book)
Puffin Babies in Australia ISBN 978-01-43-50403-0 (Paperback)
Penguin Group / Woongjin, Korea, (Smart English Project – in English with MP3 audio, as you hold the ‘pen’ over the words, they are read aloud)
In Chinese – Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, Beijing, ISBN 978-7-5135-2460-5
Reviews
Chosen as one of the 12 books for the Book Buzz Project in 2009, a project distributing board books to children in remote aboriginal communities in Australia as part of the Indigenous Literacy Project.
Chosen for the Victorian Government Young Readers Program.
Other covers
