'Inspired by an extraordinary true story, Where the Heart Is explores the friendship between Dindim the Magellanic penguin and his rescuer, Joao.
'With gorgeous illustrations and flowing prose, it depicts Dindim’s 8000-mile journey to his Patagonian home, and his longing to return. Young readers will delight in travelling across the ocean with Dindim, meeting whales and albatross! Heartfelt and educational, this is a celebration of the power of friendship and the beauty of the natural world.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'The erasures and evasions that characterize picturebook retellings of the true story of Dindim and João Pereira de Souza are instructive of the ways in which some children’s literature understates, distorts, and displaces human impacts on the environment. By reframing anthropogenic disaster as animal rescue, the story of interspecies companionship effectively mutes and disarms the story of environmental catastrophe. In the process, it forestalls eco-critical awareness of and solutions to problems such as chronic pollution, habitat destruction, species extinction, and climate change. By decontextualizing complex origin stories, erasing uncomfortable facts, and romanticizing interspecies relationships, the picturebooks discussed reveal the challenges to environmental consciousness imposed by the imperative to moral or emotional uplift in children’s literature.' (Introduction)
'The erasures and evasions that characterize picturebook retellings of the true story of Dindim and João Pereira de Souza are instructive of the ways in which some children’s literature understates, distorts, and displaces human impacts on the environment. By reframing anthropogenic disaster as animal rescue, the story of interspecies companionship effectively mutes and disarms the story of environmental catastrophe. In the process, it forestalls eco-critical awareness of and solutions to problems such as chronic pollution, habitat destruction, species extinction, and climate change. By decontextualizing complex origin stories, erasing uncomfortable facts, and romanticizing interspecies relationships, the picturebooks discussed reveal the challenges to environmental consciousness imposed by the imperative to moral or emotional uplift in children’s literature.' (Introduction)
