Let It Go

Let It Go encourages children to explore what emotions feel like in their body and find a unique way to release them. Join Aroha and her friends as they navigate their way through four emotions: sadness, anger, shame, and fear.

The Latin derivative for the word emotion, 'emotere,' literally means energy in motion. Following on from the huge success of Aroha's Way, Aroha and her friends are again showing children they are not alone in feeling uncomfortable emotions and empowering them with strategies to manage those feelings when they arise.

In the back of the book, we have extra notes in the hope that it will again open up conversations between adults and children. Learning to label emotions, recognise how they feel in the body, and ways we can allow those emotions to be let go are all valuable tools for our tamariki.

Ages: 5 plus

Author: Bex Lipp was co-founder of the award-winning business Awesome Inc, which started around creating gratitude journals and was a great base to launch into publishing children's books. Bex also co-wrote the book Finding Gratitude through Quarto Publishing in the US. Bex's own personal story of struggles with mental health issues led her to come up with the idea of making a picture book around the emotions associated with anxiety.

Craig Phillips has worked as a professional illustrator for the US and Australian publishing industries for twenty years. His client list includes Random House, Scholastic, Simon and Schuster, Hachette, Hardie Grant, Bloomsbury, Oxford University Press, and many more. His work has appeared in art anthologies such as The Society of Illustrators Annual, Spectrum Fantastic Art Annual, and Luerzers 200 Best Illustrators Worldwide, and has been exhibited at the Museum of American Illustration. Phillips also worked on Neil Gaiman's American Gods in 2017. His first solo work, titled Giants, Trolls, Witches, Beasts: Ten Tales from the Deep, Dark Woods (Allen and Unwin, 2017) won the NZ Book Award's Russell Clark Award for Illustration, a Gold Ledger in the Australian Ledger Awards, a Notable Book in the CBCA Awards, and was also a finalist in the Aurealis Awards.