Title: Shine, Star, Shine! (Wild Wanderers #4)
Author: Dom Conlon
Illustrator: Anastasia Izlesou
Publisher: Graffeg
Genre: Children’s picture book
Book format: Paperback
Sweet Strawberries: 
Description: Travel with Star as her light zips across 9 million miles of space from her home to Earth, where she ripens crops, keeps us warm, creates weather and reveals a waking world full of life.
*Free copy provided by publisher for review…
Review: This is a lovely book all about the sun and has some stunning illustrations! Star, (which we call the sun) does lots of things: heats up the world, helps warm children, grows crops and much more. Following Star as she travels from east to west, this book shows children exactly what star does and why she is so important. ‘Shine, Star, Shine!’ is a little wider than A4 in size and the paperback is filled with lots of thick matt pages of illustrations and text.
The book takes a look at the facts about what our sun does, while explaining every scene in a poetic way. Some of the lines in this book have some rhyming, though most don’t, but all of them show some aspect of our sun and how important it is to our world. The book begins by explaining how Star came to be, before showing us the different things that Star does. Although the text focuses on what Star does, the illustrations accompanying every double page shows these things happening while also following the journey of a boy and his cat.
I love the illustrations in this book. Most of them take on a darker tone, often showing Star in space or against the darkness of night. There’s something so interesting about the illustrations. They are so detailed and I just love how you can spot lots of interesting things you might miss on first glance while looking at this book. The illustrations do show the different aspects of Star, such as how she warms up children playing in the sea, the aurora lights and even just rising and falling throughout a typical day. And through this whole journey there is a little boy and his cat, who are always present in each double page, either watching Star on TV, experiencing her in a field of crops, etc. I especially love the last couple of pages of the story, which not only explain more about what Star does but I just love that image of the boy, older, and the final image of the cat which was just so special and perfect.
There’s something very interesting about this book and I just love how children can learn about Star (our sun) and how important it is to our lives. The words in this book are good, but it’s the added pictures that made me enjoy reading this more. It’s a very different illustration to the ones in ‘Blow, Wind, Blow!’, given how dark most of the images are, which did make me wonder if I’d like this so much, but there’s something so lovely and striking about the detail in all of the illustrations and the on-going story of the boy and his cat too. There are a few facts about stars and space at the end of the book, which I found very interesting too, and it’s a great introduction for children who might develop an interest in stars in the future.
Overall this is a lovely children’s book and a great one to introduce the sun. The darker images might not be to everyone’s taste, but learning about the sun, Star, and everything Star does made this a great read. And with such lovely and detailed illustrations, I’m sure many will want to look at this book more than once.
What do you think of this book? Do you like books about stars? Let me know what you think in the comments below 🙂
The Strawberry Post 
Hey! Hope your doing well, thank you for uplifting aspiring Authors by reviewing their books on a voluntary basis, I would like to request you to kindly do me a favor by reviewing my book. Thank you
LikeLiked by 1 person