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There’s an elusive yet distinctly joyful quality to Carson Ellis’s picture book that feels like suspended glee, or a laugh caught halfway in the throat. Sentence construction is different in other languages and it’s really important that the gibberish phrases scan because that’s part of how a reader figures out what the bugs are saying, and working out what they are saying is part of the fun. Bicknell edited without an English translation—it only occurred to her after several rounds that there was a deliberate logic to the bugs’ seemingly nonsensical speech.

It's a genuinely charming story with brain-tickling interest from the dialogue, and it earns a satisfying edge from the silent and decisive victory over the spider. The entire story unfolds on the same small stretch of ground, where each new detail is integral to the scene at hand. Using a made-up bug language, the story is told in the dialogue between the creatures as their world changes. The creator of Home explores the astonishing changes in a garden, where insects talk their own mysterious language. It stimulates conversation, discussion; children would have great fun giving the bugs names, describing their characters, predicting what might happen next and why in relation to what they already know of the world around them.Theatre Royal Brighton welcomed the company in to develop and rehearse the new show during the closure of the venue and to present initial performances when lock down eased. Children and adults alike can guess at what the 'bug words' might mean and in doing so, inadvertently create a narrative all by themselves.

She is also the illustrator of The Composer Is Dead by Lemony Snicket and Dillweed's Revenge: A Deadly Dose of Magic by Florence Parry Heide, and she collaborated with her husband, Colin Meloy, on the best-selling Wildwood series. A bold retro color palette and lots of white space allow a big beautiful story plenty of room to breathe. Using intricate illustrations supported by spare dialogue in an invented language, Ellis elegantly weaves the tale of several square feet of ground in the insect world as the seasons pass. Every time we read this book we discover new things and I feel that it is teaching my child about nature and discovery, feelings, loss and rebirth. Carson matches them with dialogue in the enchanting foreign language of the elegantly dressed beetles and insects that live on a small, eventful patch of earth.

This book was a total hit with my three year old who loved the made up language and would use the words. The illustrations are wonderful and each spread offers plenty of details about life in the bugs' world - a twig is not a twig, a toadstool grows, insects serenade one another under a moonlit sky - the circle of life continues.

There’s a touch of magical realism to Ellis’s story; the cricket plays a violin, damsel flies build a tree house, the ladybird likes to relax in a deckchair and read a book (in her own language we assume. Carson Ellis is the author-illustrator of the New York Times bestseller Home, her debut solo picture book.When the plant grows taller and sprouts leaves, some young beetles arrive to gander, and soon—with the help of a pill bug named Icky—they wrangle a ladder and build a tree fort. It would be easy to make such a story clever for the sake of being clever, but instead Ellis has created one of the smartest, most original and most endearing picture books of this year.