This second collaboration between author Nicola Davies and illustrator Laura Carlin, following the successful The Promise is another sensitive and subtle picture book. The illustrations are muddy and smudged—fitting for their coal town setting—and reveal their details only upon closer perusal. I was at my last school for 4 years and we had ********* book fairs every term – and every term, I was disappointed by the narrow range of books.

He then befriends his elderly neighbour Mr Evan, who's age means that he speaks slow enough for the little boy to understand. That he somehow finds comfort in the fact that the pigeons find home from 1200 miles away and he can't is a little odd for me.Evans goes weaker, and the boy's doubt that his pigeon, King of the Sky, is a winner grows stronger, the bird is entered into a long distance race of more than 1,000 miles beginning in Rome. An important story to share in current times, particularly in that this feeling of disorientation and even alienation could be familiar to children that have fled their countries, and found themselves unable to feel settled. And indeed she did--as part of a pair of scientific expeditions, one to Newfoundland at the age of eighteen and another to the Indian Ocean a year later. I enjoyed trying to copy your painting as a pencil drawing and received a special notice from the teacher taking me back 53 years.

Observer * "An Editor's Choice in hardback, the story of a young immigrant boy and an old man who races pigeons offers a very humane and timely slant on current world events. Just one thing reminds the boy of home - the racing pigeons belonging to his neighbour, Mr Evans (a retired miner).There's a really good message about immigration, friendship, and belonging buried somewhere in here. The slow opening up toward a more joyful sense of belonging in the story is mirrored by the poignant sense that loss, in the form of the weakening Mr. An exquisitely moving picture book for an older age group that displays extraordinary depth in an ordinary tale of a boy moving to a new place and trying to make it feel like home.