If All the World Were…

Product Information

Allison Colpoys is an award-winning freelance book designer and illustrator. Her books include The Underwater Fancy Dress Parade and Under the Love Umbrella. If All the World is her first book for Frances Lincoln Children's Books. She lives in Melbourne, Australia.

What really comes across is the honesty and emotion that he was clearly going through. How do you make sense of watching the world around you and all that you know crumble away? For him, losing himself every now and then in a fantasy world of a video game was the release he needed. It mixes the memories of different levels in the game - seeing the names appear and the challenges in each level made me smile with fondess! - alongside memories of his family and his mother. Life provides challenges of its' own and we are all competing in the video game of life - with hopefully no big bad beastie/boss at the end to have to defeat. If all the world were deep space, I’d orbit my granddad like the moon and our laughs would be shooting stars.” Book started with little girl telling the activities she did with her granddad in different seasons and shows her love for granddad by telling how happy she was how much she enjoyed all the time of all season with her granddad. I loved the way author gave word to all those moments a ‘Kaleidoscope of memory’ and the illustration of it was really beautiful. and now I think I / remember what I mean to say which is only that once / when all the world and love was young I saw it beautiful glowing / once in the corner of the room once I was sitting in its light”I used to snuggle up with my Granny, too. And she would tell me the most wonderful stories about her life and about Grandpa. And she drew beautiful birds, just like those featured in this book. If you enjoyed/want to enjoy this book please don’t read this review: I didn’t like it anywhere near as much as I thought I would and so I’ve gone ott trying to work out/justify why) This was ok. I think I like the idea of this book more than the actual content contained within. It's a collection of poems based on Super Mario and is mainly about a mother's death from cancer and memory. The Super Mario theme is obvs metaphorical for going on a journey, a quest, etc. I liked the poem about the uncle who was a miner, who died in Tasmania, as it creates an interesting parallel with Mario (who's a miner himself of sorts, isn't he?). The comparisons of Mario w Dante were also v interesting. I loved the poem that had the image of Otzi the Iceman, waiting for thousands of years with berries in his gut, extending a frozen hand. So cool! And the other poem about looking at fossils of dinosaur stampede and wonderig what spooked them. So yeah, as you can see, big theme here of time etc. Over time, Crowther predicts that we would see the release of 450 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere – more than doubling the amount that humans have already contributed. For a while, this effect would be offset by smaller plants and grasses. But while smaller plants capture carbon at a faster rate than trees, they also release it more rapidly. Eventually – perhaps over a few decades – these plants would no longer be able to head off the coming warming. “The timeline depends on where you are, since decomposition is much faster in the tropics than the Arctic,” D’Odorico says. “But once carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, it doesn’t matter if it’s coming from here or from there.” If all the world were memories, the past would be rooms I could visit and in each room would be my grandad.”

Let me just start with how horrible a world without trees would be – they are irreplaceable,” says Isabel Rosa, a lecturer in environmental data and analysis at Bangor University in Wales. “If we get rid of all the trees, we will live [on] a planet that might not actually be able to sustain us anymore.” I would like it even more if author had written more on child’s emotion after the loss and also parents’ involvement with their kid helping her to put her thoughts and emotions into that diary. It seemed like granddad thought about it beforehand kid just understood the purpose of that. As the child of a cancer survivor, this book definitely hit home a lot more than I thought it would, but damn did I love it. The poems, read after each other in one sitting, tell the story of a man grieving his mother in one of the most expressive mediums out there. It’s a wonderful way of showing how the loss of his mother affected him through poetry, but also by using the images from his childhood love. It puts the way people grieve into a new perspective and makes you think about the way that you yourself might experience loss. This is a highly original hybrid of video game imagery and a narrative about the final illness of his mother, who died in 2012. As a child the poet was obsessed with Super Mario World. He overlays the game’s landscapes onto his life to create an almost hallucinogenic fairy tale. Into this virtual world, which blends idyll and threat, comes the news of his mother’s cancer:He says "You're too old to hold hands. But still I hold his giant hand. And we explore, hand in hand." These are the days of no letters her signature starved with jitters / in the few half hours she’s awake to make arrangements: no flowers / or no more than is natural for a swift discreet funeral / and burial with her parents tea and sandwiches afterwards. / She sleeps the undertaker leaves the fountain leaks in the courtyard. / My head is heavier than stone. I read yesterday’s newspapers / not either asleep or awake let me please die is what she says. / It’s me I’m here is what I say but I am not since she is not. / Then she says I want to go home once more for one once more one night / and I say you can’t go home now she says I know not now after.”