Country Town (Isolde Martyn & Robyn Ridgeway, illus Louise Hogan, Ford St)

Country Town is the first picture book for both historical novelist Isolde Martyn and Aboriginal Studies teacher Robyn Ridgeway. From a fusion of interesting factoids about real Australian towns, Martyn and Ridgeway present readers with a jampacked timeline for an imaginary country town. The book is informative and attempts to humanise those from the past by featuring and referring back to a number of simple characters. Country Town features a range of topics and is suitable for classroom activities for grades 5–6 or younger, including starting discussions and inviting students to think more deeply about what they have read. It also includes a URL on one page that links readers to a historical paper about the horses used to cross the Blue Mountains in 1813. Despite being densely packed, Country Town is an engaging and digestible introduction to learning history, full of playful and colloquial language. The text is brought to life by Louise Hogan’s charming and detailed artworks, which have a Where’s Wally? feel to them and will prompt readers to compare what they see with how things look in the modern day. Before revealing the relevant text, children can write or talk about what they can and can’t spot in the illustrations and what time period they believe is being depicted.

Read Baran Rostamian’s interview with the authors here.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Baran Rostamian is an emerging writer living in Boorloo and a 2023 recipient of the Green Leaves / Red River poetry manuscript publishing project in partnership with Red River Press. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Category: Reviews