Footpath Flowers - Book Review

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Footpath Flowers is a wordless picture book written by JonArno Lawson and illustrated by Sydney Smith. A critically acclaimed bestseller, Footpath Flowers is 32 pages long, and suitable for children between 3 and 5 years of age. It was originally published by Groundwork Books on 1 March 2015. It was released in Australia through Walker Books on 1 June 2016. Footpath Flowers has been translated into 15 different languages and has received a lot of awards and praise. In 2015 it was awarded the Governor General Award for Illustration and it also made it onto the New York Time's Best Illustrated Book List of that year.

Sydney Smith brings Footpath Flowers to life wordlessly through his beautiful illustrations. The story follows a little girl who leaves her house to go on a walk with her father and along the way discovers little bunches of wildflowers growing in places where people wouldn't think to look. She finds them growing next to a bicycle, pushing up through the gaps of some bricks, peeking through a crack in the footpath, and growing at the foot of a statue. What I really liked about this book was how Smith was able to use his illustrations to show us the perspective of the child and how she viewed the world. At the start of the book, the landscape is black and white, with the only real bright spot being the girl's red coat. As the girl looks around her surroundings, her face is bright, and when she spots the flowers, they are colourful little splashes against the grey landscape. The child can see things that the adults around her cannot which is finding beauty in unlikely places. As the girl finds and plucks more flowers, more and more colour starts to appear on the pages, washing out the black and white.

Footpath Flowers is a wonderful book that will appeal to both adults and children. The illustrations brilliantly capture the innocence of the little girl in the book and her pure view of the world in contrast to the world of adults which is bland and colourless. The wordless narrative of the book is an important reminder of appreciating our surroundings and how the act of giving can make the world a brighter and happier place.

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