Go, Scooter, Go!, Kyle Mewburn, illustrated by Kaye JulianPenguin Random House, 2025 The Storylines Gavin Bishop Award is open to previously unpublished illustrators. The Award honours one of our much loved author illustrators and gives support to emerging artists. The annual winner is mentored by Gavin, receives a monetary award and an offer of publication […]
Go, Scooter, Go!, Kyle Mewburn, illustrated by Kaye Julian
Penguin Random House, 2025
The Storylines Gavin Bishop Award is open to previously unpublished illustrators. The Award honours one of our much loved author illustrators and gives support to emerging artists. The annual winner is mentored by Gavin, receives a monetary award and an offer of publication by Penguin Random House NZ. The 2024 winner is Kaye Julian for Go, Scooter, Go!.
The book launch celebrations of Go, Scooter, Go! will take place at the 2025 Storylines Margaret Mahy Day on Sunday April 6th at the National Library in Parnell.
Children’s authors in Aotearoa are currently on a roll! I pick up a picture book and am back there in the joy and delight of what children’s books can do! See my review of Ruth Paul’s fabulous book. And Go, Scooter, Go! is Kyle Mewburn at her musical magical marvellous best. The rhythm and rhyme hits the mark. The mayhem movement is contagious as Hugo goes whooshing and swooshing, fast and faster, on his little blue scooter, gathering an extraordinary animal crew on the way.
Add in a Margaret Mahy dollop of imagination and an excellent ending, and you get a sizzling whizzling read. Just the book to ignite a child’s love of words and stories and animals.
Kaye Julian’s award-winning illustrations also hit the mark as they bring the story to zesty life on the page. Such movement! Such detail. Each page a picnic stop of fascinations. I love the way a good illustrator enhances a story, adds in visual layers and levels of storytelling. It might be setting, it might be characters and mood, it might be gestures and actions. Kaye does all of this and more.
Like Kyle, Kaye also brings imagination into play. Wow! I adore the crew of co-travellers she has gathered – I adore the shifting expressions on the animal faces. Ah. So many pages to stall on. Like when they reach the creaky gate and Toby has someone else on his scooter! Won’t spoil that for you! Or the very last page where you just fill to the brim with story-book comfort.
This sublime book is a perfect book to read aloud to children and then get them whizzing and whirring with their own story adventures and drawings and poems. I simply adore it. Thank you.
Kaye Julian is a freelance illustrator based in Te Whanganui a Tara Wellington, New Zealand. Kaye spent her childhood poring over books in local and school libraries from long before she could read. Kaye loved to explore the beautiful artworks and learned the language of visual storytelling from the skilled artists who helped to stories to life. As Kaye grew older, she spent her time making images of her own. Kaye is the winner of the 2024 Storylines Gavin Bishop Award, and her illustrations will be featured in the upcoming book Go Scooter Go, written by the award-winning author Kyle Mewburn, publishing in March 2025.
Kyle Mewburn is a multi-award-winning writer. Born and raised in Brisbane, Australia, Mewburn travelled in Europe and the Middle East before settling in New Zealand. She has written numerous children’s picture books and chapter books. She won the 2005 Storylines Joy Cowley Award for the development of a picture book text; the 2007 NZ Post Best Picture Book Award and Children’s Choice Award for Kiss! Kiss! Yuck! Yuck!; and the 2010 NZ Post Book of the Year for Old Huhu (illustrated by Rachel Driscoll). She has since produced a memoir, Faking It: My Life in Transition (2021) and a novel, Sewing Moonlight (2024). She lives with her wife Marion in Millers Flat, Central Otago, in a house with a grass roof.
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