What We’ll Build: Plans for Our Together Future

Oliver Jeffers

HarperCollins, 2020

48pp., hbk., RRP $A 24.99

9780008382209

What shall we build, you and I?

I’ll build your future and you’ll build mine.

We’ll build a watch to keep our time.

Sitting perfectly alongside its predecessor Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth in which Jeffers tries to offer an explanation of this planet and how it works so that his young son Harland  (and any other little children) will be able to negotiate it successfully; this time Jeffers is talking to his daughter Mari about how they will build their future together with a home to keep them safe, love to keep them warm and memories to cherish. Thus it is as much about satisfying the tangible, physical needs as the intangible, emotional that are perhaps even more critical.

Given the year that just was, this is the perfect start to a new year – one which has never been more anticipated and had more hope built into it by our young students – so that they can look forward rather than back and think about their dreams and how they might build these, while for the adult sharing the book it is a time for them to pause, look at their children and grasp that there, is one of their dreams come true – a happy, healthy child. And the future for each is inextricably intertwined.

Jeffers has a unique style of both text and illustration which is perfectly suited to this sort of philosophical text; one that might be directed to his daughter but which has universal application for starting this new year.  If 2021 is to live up to expectation what do we need to do to ensure that it does?