I’m Very Busy: A (Nearly Forgotten) Birthday Book

As a child, our birthday is perhaps one of the most important days of the year. As a child we imagine everyone around us is also thinking about our birthday for as many weeks in advance as we are! This is the premise of Oliver Jeffers’ ‘I’m Very Busy’. This is a playful but poignant picture book that uses striking and stylised images of Bridget, our birthday girl, as she visits her friends in anticipation of a birthday party. As each of her friends in turn tells her of their busyness and so inability to see her ‘later’, her disappointment grows.

If it is important to you to have a happy ending, this book does as it dawns on each character that it is Bridget’s birthday and clearly, that is much more important than the tasks that had been taking their time. The book encourages us to re-evaluate how we spend our time and what we value.