Maisie’s Scrapbook by Samuel Narh

We love love love the characters, illustrations and topics covered in this book. Great to see very real portraits of life and Ghanaian cultural details in there. So happy to see a mixed race family as the focal point to help normalise our own family for our son.

It is like a scrapbook (as the title suggests) in that it’s quite an eclectic mix of memories/ moments. I think for my son who’s still quite young, this can make it feel a bit more abstract and harder to follow. So I’d say story narratives probably work better for us at this stage. But so worth it, to see these characters represented in books where so often they are hard to find.

Maisie's scrapbook is such a beautiful book and a great conversation starter about race and difference. I have had little chats about this with my just turned 5 year old daughter before, but this book has been so great at giving us the opportunity to explore it a bit more. My 2.5 year old absolutely loved the imagery and pointing at different things and talking about what was going on in the book, making up his own stories too!The pages are quite tactile and feel lovely to touch and turn! The illustrations are just gorgeous and there is so much to talk about just by looking at the pictures. Both my children had great fun looking at the pictures and 'reading' the story. We loved reading about mama, dada and Maisie and how although they are all different and do different things, mama and dada's hugs feel the same and they also love Maisie the same! Just fabulous

Such a beautiful story about Maisie and her parents. The book is so wonderfully presented. From the very first page you fell like you are in Maisie’s book. With handwritten entries and pictures.
We loved how they talk about how different her parents are and yet the same at the same time.
It’s so lovely how Maisie talks about how her parents care and protect her, from the bull she wants to play with, and how she is the hero in all her dads stories.

Matthew loved that she used the rocking chair to pretend she was riding the bull. He also loved learning about the food they eat in different cultures. “We have risotto all the time” he said.. “but we have never tried jollof rice before”
It got us searching for a jollof recipe to try and we learnt lots about where the dish came from and how it’s prepared. Today we went shopping to buy all the ingredients to make it on the weekend. We are all very excited to try it!

We love when books spark conversations and when we learn more about the cultures and people in the stories. It’s a truly lovely story.

This book is just lovely. Maisie is mixed race and has parents from two different cultures, this book celebrates their differences as well as highlighting the similarities in their love for her.

A beautiful tale that doesn't quite read as a story to me, more like a sort of 3rd person noted view into the love of Maisie's family. It's really heartwarming.

Jo Loring-Fisher's illustrations are stunning as usual. Really gentle and dreamy.

I really recommend this book. It beautifully written story about Maisie and the many influences in her life. It’s fab for children of a mixed heritage especially as it’s very relatable. It’s also lovely to learn about another culture/country.