Half for You and Half for Me ─ Best-Loved Nursery Rhymes and the Stories Behind Them

"Half for you and half for me" is the first line in a short nursery rhyme that continues with "Between us two shall goodwill be." The phrase is a fitting title for this book, which was inspired by the experience of shared reading, and whose audience is children as well as adults. The author, award-winning novelist Katherine Govier, grew up with her mother reading to her, especially from one of their favorite books, The Jessie Willcox Smith Mother Goose. Katherine is now the one who reads to her mother, whose eyesight has degenerated so that she has trouble making out letters. This experience inspired Katherine to collect her favorite nursery rhymes and annotate them. She discovered that the oldest rhymes were not intended for children, but repeated by adults, who were for the most part powerless to change their situations. They would use rhymes speak in code, marking events, making fun of the powerful and passing judgement. In Half for You and Half for Me, the author breaks the codes of these nursery rhymes in accessible, amusing explanations. Beautifully illustrated with vintage pictures as well as contemporary color drawings done especially for this book, Half for You and Half for Me will engage, delight, entertain and inform younger and older readers alike. An essential title for every family bookshelf.

Katherine Govier is the author of twelve novels including, The Ghost Brush, which has been translated into French, Spanish and Japanese. Her novel Creation, about John James Audubon in Labrador, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2003. She has also won Canada's Marian Engel Award (1997), the Toronto Book Award (1992), and has twice been shortlisted for the Trillium prize. Today she is the founder and Director of The Shoe Project, working to improve the written and spoken English of immigrant women. Katherine travels often between Toronto and Canmore, Alberta.

Sarah Clement is a graduate of Langara College and Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She has participated in solo exhibitions in Vancouver, and, most recently, in Berlin, where she lived for the past year. Sarah takes her inspiration from the natural world and is interested in telling visual stories through whimsy and detail.