One of childhood’s most mercurial big ideas is that the world is physically greater and experientially richer than what we see and know. In her first solo book, Governor General’s Award-winning illustrator Joanne Fitzgerald simplifies this concept with great success. Page by page, the text and illustrations move from the idea of a world to a country, a city, and so on, down to a child’s room, a child’s bed, and finally a child underneath a blanket. Then we zoom back out from the bedroom to the vast world.

The text is spare, with one short phrase per page. The country and city are never named, but Fitzgerald wisely puts the lesson in the voice of the unnamed child, personalizing the broader concepts.

Fitzgerald’s bright watercolour illustrations grow bolder and more detailed as the text progresses to the comfort of the child’s room. Fitzgerald plays around with perspective to great effect, using varied vantage points to present each place as the story telescopes in to the child’s room. This helps suggest the relative anonymity of the larger environments (world and country), compared with the intimacy and variety of more intimate settings (neighbourhood and house).

This book shows great deliberation, in the economy and clarity of the text, the detailed and engaging pictures, and the place included at the front of the book for children to record their own name, street, and town. This is Me and Where I Am frames big ideas in a simple and clever way.