“How do we find happiness? “And once we find it, can we hold onto it?

This is the story of an island community who are hard workers that rarely smiled and never ever laughed. The community worked so hard that they never stopped to look around them and see how beautiful their island actually was, instead of enjoying it’s beauty they would spend their days in their buildings and town working… Except for a blind urchin who slept under the stars and enjoyed the beauty of the island around him. The urchin would bring beautiful things into town and offer them to people, instead they’d walk right by and ignored him.

One day the urchin meets a beautiful sea creature who became his friend, they’d swim together, play together and laugh together. Soon the entire community begins to play with the sea creature and laugh, but they were afraid it might leave them one day, so they decide to capture it and keep it forever so that they will never be unhappy again…

If only they knew…

This is a great children’s story about happiness, friendship, paying attention to the beauty around us, about beauty, life and what is important to us. How often do we stop and look at the beauty around us, how often do we need urchins to teach us how to laugh again, how much are we working and do we work too much?

Beautifully illustrated this is a simple story about a community who has forgotten what’s beautiful and how to laugh.

The Island
John Heffernan and Peter Sheehan
Scholastic Australia, 2005.
ISBN 1 86504 813 5

Buy at Books Direct: The Island

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