The success of this picture book, with its wonderful watercolours by Caroline Binch, marked a urning point in my career. So another character says,"You can't be Peter Pan - he wasn't Black".
Because things have moved on a bit in equality between the sexes since I was grace's age, I added another level of challenge by making her Black. So when Grace wanted to be Peter Pan, I had another character tell her she couldn't because she was a girl. When I was a little girl, acting out pantomimes with my sister, I played all the leading parts - it didn't matter to me if they were for boys or girls, though I noticed boys' roles were often more fun. Grace is really me - a little girl who loved stories. I was far away from the doorbell's ring or the phone. I roughed out the story sitting in a health club in London, wearing a towel. I had already written about forty books by the time Amazing Grace was published in 1991, but it is fair to say that it was Grace who changed my life. This is my own account of the Grace Story. The central idea of the Grace books - that you can be anything you want - has caught the imagination of thousands of readers. It has been included (2013) in Booktrust's list of the 100 Best Books for Children in the last 100 years! No one, not even myself, suspected how popular Grace would become. Amazing Grace, the first book about Grace, was published in 1991.
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