Scholastic New Zealand Award for
Best Children’s Book 2015
Highly Commended 2015
Designer Donovan Bixley (Magma Design)
Title Monkey Boy by Donovan Bixley
Publisher Scholastic New Zealand
Format 210 x 148mm, 228pp, paperback
Judges’ Comments As the cover notes, this book is part novel, part comic and all action and it delivers on all of those points. The real hero here, apart from cabin boy Jimmy Grimholt of course, are the wonderful illustrations that Donovan Bixley has masterfully woven through the book. They provide the perfect balance of visual fire-power against traditional typeset text to help keep the young readers fully engaged, and create a perfect bridge between a graphic novel and more traditional text based story telling. Books like these that kids love to read should be celebrated.
