In Valley Child, Jockie Loomer-Kruger tells the universal stories of childhood by drilling deeply into the particular: her own childhood, in her own family, in her own corner of Nova Scotia. Her paintings are exuberant and joyful: alive with vivid colours and textures, inventiveness, and wit. The accompanying stories do not merely fill in the background of the pictures. Instead they create moments in time held up to a light that is not nostalgia but something far richer: a child's truth seen through the eyes of the adult she has become.
Text and image work in harmony to create a book that is always ruthlessly honest, but is also by turns poignant, sad, wistful, and laugh-out-loud funny.
Text and image work in harmony to create a book that is always ruthlessly honest, but is also by turns poignant, sad, wistful, and laugh-out-loud funny.