After the huge success of her debut picture book, The Girl Who Stole The Stars, Corrina brings this beautiful story about the meaning of being strong, brave and fearless. A gentle and timely picture book helping children engage and talk about feelings of love and loss. Corrina is a highly talented new author/ illustrator with a wonderfully quirky style, bringing to life her colourful world. What does it mean to be strong, brave and fearless? When a little boy finds a broken rainbow lying on the ground he decides to take it home and look after it. The little boy loves the rainbow but when it eventually disappears he finds out what it really means to be strong, brave and fearless. A magical story exploring one boy’s journey through love and loss.
Genre: Picture Book
Number of Pages: 32 Pages
Date of Publication: 04/07/2022
Author/Illustrator/Publisher:
The author and illustrator of this book is Corrina Campbell. The book has been published by Little Door Books.
Review:
Loss and grief can be very sensitive topics especially for children. ‘The boy who rescued a rainbow’ focuses on explaining and illustrating these difficult and challenging topics by making the boys feeling of love physically present in the form of a rainbow. Corrina wrote a beautiful book that is so simple but so complex at the same time and where the illustrations are very important as they transmit the feeling of the many emotions in a way that children will understand.
The story focuses on a boy who goes on exciting adventures and during one he finds a rainbow which was lost and broken. He decides to rescue it, look after it and after it has been fixed begins to go on adventures with it. One day it disappears and he is sad and angry but continues going on his adventures. On another adventure he sees a rainbow and remembers his happiness with his rainbow. On the surface this is a fairly standard children story with the boy in the traditional role of fighting dragons and adventuring but there is another layer to the story in which we see how we are meant to deal with our emotions. The story makes this easy for children to understand by having love represented by a rainbow that the boy spends time fixing and reassembling before it eventually fades away over time. The book demonstrates that the boy continuing to be brave and to go on adventures before, during and after his time with the rainbow and the art illustrates how the same activities can feel different. The book ends with the boy remembering his time with the rainbow and his happy memories.
Children deal with emotions in so many different ways and sometimes talking about them is really hard and this book is a great way to start a conversation about them and to show that it’s okay to be feel things and it does not mean you are not brave.
In a personal note we recently lost one of our guinea pigs and this is the first time that my boys experience losing someone close to them. There were tears, questions, sadness and grief and reading this book this last weekend truly helped as my boys read that it is ok to feel sad, angry and that it is ok to cry. The happy memories of the person/pet that they lost will always stay with them and this book reinforces this in a really cute way.
A fantastic an incredible book for younger children and parents.
On a side note: Corrina Campbell is going to appear in person at the Edinburgh book festival on Friday the 19th of August. She will be doing a kid’s workshop. She will also be part of a panel discussion with the publisher little door books on Monday 22nd of august and this is such a great opportunity to meet the publisher and the author.
Thank you so much Little Door Books for our gifted book.
Availability: The book is coming out on the 04/07/2022 and it will be available in all good bookshops.
Shelf Life 
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