This evocative picture book celebrates a child’s connection and kinship with whales.
SHOW US WHERE YOU LIVE, HUMPBACK
by Beryl Young
illustrated by Sakika Kikuchi
Greystone Books, May 2021
Swimming, singing, and blowing bubbles—children and baby whales love many of the same things! This lyrical picture book compares the parent-child relationship with the bond between a mother humpback whale and her calf, showing how their underwater lives are touchingly like our own. Patterned in a call-and-response format, where the mother observes and the child responds, this book is peppered with facts and begs to be read aloud. At the story’s end, acclaimed author Beryl Young and debut illustrator Sakika Kikuchi leave readers dreaming of the wonderful world we share with whales.
Beryl Young is the author of several critically acclaimed and award-winning books for children, including picture books, middle-grade novels, and biographies.Young fell in love with humpback whales watching them swim off the coast of British Columbia and in the warm bays of Hawaii.She lives in Vancouver and has three children and four grandchildren.
Sakika Kikuchi is an illustrator who has loved picture books and stories since her childhood. After studying graphic design at Tama Art University in Tokyo, she worked as an in-house designer for a few years before moving to the UK to complete her MA in children’s book illustration at the Cambridge School of Art. She lives in Japan. This is her first picture book.

On the brink of execution, 16 year old Ebba den Eeden is unexpectedly “elevated” from the bunker deep in South Africa’s Table Mountain where she has lived all her life, believing—as do all the other teenagers who toil daily to make their food and power the bunker—that the world « Above » is uninhabitable due to a nuclear holocaust. Instead, she is heiress to a massive fortune―one that everyone wants to control. While dealing with the machinations of the High Priest, his handsome son Hal, and the rules and regulations of a society and religion she doesn’t understand, she must also try to save her three friends, still stuck in the bunker and facing execution any day.
Little lion Luka is NOT worried about a visit to the doctor. He’s NOT scared of getting a shot. And he’s definitely NOT a little lion anymore. R-O-A-R! His younger sister, Lulu, might be nervous for her first checkup—but no need to worry, big brother is here to set a brave example. Step by step, he walks her through what will happen, offering encouragement and holding her hand. But when it’s his turn, on second thought, maybe he doesn’t need to see Dr. Brown today; he’s feeling perfectly fine, after all…
Robyn Ayres works as the camp caretaker on Finch Island, a former leper colony off the coast of Queensland. Her current clients are a group of ex-military men who run a tough-love program for troubled teens. The latest crop looks like the usual mix of bad boys and sad boys. Then Robyn takes a second look at a kid called Darren. Last time she saw him his name was Aaron, and Robyn was his primary school teacher. And she was somehow at the centre of a vicious small-town custody battle involving his terrifying grandmother.
BODIES OF LIGHT tracks the life of Maggie: from her childhood shuttled from one abusive care home to another; to domestic happiness that ends in tragedy; to the arms of a passionate woman in New Zealand; and to a new existence in the USA—only for her to find that she can’t leave her old self behind so easily. This is the story of a life in full, detailed, wrenching, sensuous and compelling. It’s about trauma and heartbreak, memory and loss, the refusal to do anything but survive, no matter the odds.