Tuesday, 25 September 2012

Mirror by Jeanie Baker


This book is a great story although it contains barely any text. Apart from a brief introduction about what the book portrays and instructions as to how it should be read, as well as a short note from the author about how this book came to be, every other bit of information the book uses is a collage image. This supports the ever growing theory that pictures are in themselves a form of text. Mirror is the story of two young boys and their families, one lives in Sydney in Australia while the other lives in the Valley of Roses in southern Morocco. 

The aim of this book is to show that however different a person may look to us, their outward appearance is not telling of who they really how and how they think. As shown in this book, each family does things differently, as their culture demands or as they see fit, however they have similar values and ways of doing things for example, the boy from Sydney goes to the market with his dad in a car on the busy roads of a major city, whereas the young boy from Morocco hops on the back of his families donkey and escorts his mother to the market to sell a carpet and some sheep.

This book very much relieves a barrier between two very different types of people as it shows we are all different yet very similar at the same time. This book would be a great theme to discuss in a primary classroom but could also work nicely for older students as well as there are no words to make it sound young or old.

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