Bloomsbury The Book of Hopes: Words and Pictures to Comfort, Inspire and Entertain

A book full of wonderful stories to lift the heart

My daughter asked me to buy this book because she read it in school. She wanted to have her own copy. She love it and read regularly, sometimes, takes it in car while I am driving.

I love that a contribution from each sale goes to charity, but ordered it thinking it would include colour illustrations for the price and from the description, so was a little disappointed that the illustrations were just b&w. The publishers missed a trick there, as they could have made a truly beautiful book with the original illustrations in a slightly larger format and sold it for twice the price. Shame to have amassed such great contributions but only print them in b&w and cheap stock. Still looked like a lovely book but didn't feel it would captivate my 3 year old or that I would enjoy it as much myself. I purchased it with the idea of treating it like a sort of keepsake book I could enjoy myself and sharing with my daughter, but felt like the production values let it down in that respect - beautiful cover but lightweight paper and so just didn't feel like a book I'd cherish holding or poring over. So unfortunately decided to return at this price point. Only removed one star for this as I feel it still deserves praise for the content and would still suit slightly older readers.

My daughter enjoyed this at school so we got a copy for home.It has some really lovely stories in as well as pictures and poems. On all different subjects and topics.The varying length of stories are ideal reading at any time of the day. It just depends on how long you want to read!

This book is lovely, and perfect for bedtime as it’s just short stories and poems. My 9 year old and 4 year old have both been enjoying it. The only downside is that it’s a shame the illustrations are in black and white and not colour, which would have added to the “happy and hopeful” message/theme of the book