Jessica's Box

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Author: Peter Carnavas
Illustrator: Peter Carnavas
Publisher:  London: New Frontier Publishing, 2017
Award: Children's Book Council of Australia: Notable Australian Children's Books: Early Childhood





Simple yet significant, Jessica's Box is a touching story about friendship and belonging. Struggling to make friends at her new school, Jessica, an ability-diverse character, brings to school a cardboard box of special things to initiate conversation and impress other children. For the first three days, nothing works, but on the fourth day when feeling rejected and discouraged, Jessica leaves for the school with the box on her head, she can surprisingly make friend with a boy and realizes that just being herself is sufficient those who would appreciate her would be impressed just by who she is.
In the original iteration in 2008, awarded by Children's Book Council of Australia, the young protagonist is not portrayed with disability, but in the new version, Jessica uses a wheelchair. 
This edition features the same text from 2008, with a minimum of words, accompanied by Carnavas’s spacious cartoons, simple mixed-media illustrations, and ample white space in which Jessica’s wheelchair and her visible disability is neither hidden, nor centralized.

For more information:
goodreads
author's website


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