Hooray, Hooray, it’s Library Day by Julie Anne Grasso, Heath McKenzie (illustrator)

Title: Hooray, Hooray, it’s Library Day

Author: Julie Anne Grasso, Heath McKenzie (illustrator)

Genre: Contemporary

Publisher: Scholastic Australia

Published: 1^st July 2024

Format: Hardcover

Pages: 24

Price: $18.99

Synopsis: The sun is up, today’s the day. The little ones come, with smiles so wide and silky bags as big as them … A lonely library book sits on the shelf, hoping for small hands to choose them … Will today be the day they’re whisked away for a reading adventure?

~*~

The little red library book is sitting on the shelf, hoping that it will be borrowed. As each child explores the books, dumping the books they borrow in their silky bags, but nobody wants the lonely red library book. All it wants is an adventure – will today be the day?

Books about books – always an interesting and fun subject, because every author approaches it differently depending on genre, plot, theme and age group. And having read many books about books, I was interested to see how this one turned out. Julie Anne Grasso has taken a different stance to the ones I have seen before – telling the story through the perspective of a library book wanting to be borrowed and read, and the adventure that it goes on.

As the story goes on, the library book’s joy at being read and played with during its adventure is vibrantly told by Julie Anne Grasso, who gets into the heart and mind of a book and how it feels when it is being read, and in the hands of a reader who wants to keep it with them at all times. The accompanying illustrations by Heath McKenzie bring the story to life in bright, vibrant colours and illustrations full of life as the library book tells its story about being borrowed, travelling on a train, being tugged, and being drooled on – all of which Heath brings to life wonderfully to match Julie Anne’s story.

I felt that this book was a love story to libraries, books, and readers, celebrating what books mean to us and by extension, what readers mean to books. About the life that a reader can breathe into a book that becomes part of us. Especially the books we read as children – everyone has a book, or books that they read as a child that has always stayed with them. And books fill our lives with magic, a kind of magic that has been captured in this book so wonderfully as the act of reading is explored.

Everything in this book is beautifully put together, and I think is the perfect book for all ages to share the love of books and libraries. One that I hope many people will love.