My Little Star

My Little Star – BUY

Scholastic Australia (2023)

Illustrated by Matt Shanks

My sister is a star; I’m not on my own. As long as she looks down on me I’ll never be alone. A beautiful and gentle exploration of grief and loss in memory of all the little stars who live in our night sky.

Reviews of My Little Star

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199277459-my-little-star

Why did I write My Little Star?

My wife and I have a started trying for a baby in 2018. We aren’t really patient people so after a few months of not getting pregnant we decided to speak to our GP and get a few tests. This led to us discovering that I have male infertility and that we would need to do IVF which we commenced by the end of 2018. We fell pregnant on our first go and were incredibly excited, but at 9 weeks we sadly had a miscarriage. This was followed by 2 more miscarriages and after the 2nd one I wrote a poem through tear filled eyes that became the book My Little Star. In 2022 just short of 21 weeks into a pregnancy we lost my daughter Evie (I have spoken at length about this in podcasts and in the articles below if you want further information). By 2022 I had become a semi-established picture book author and I told my wonderful agent that the one thing I wanted to come from this tragedy was for Evie to have a legacy. My agent immediately spoke to Scholastic Australia offering them My Little Star and they immediately said yes. The book was illustrated by the extremely talented Matt Shanks and released October 1st 2023.

Impact

In 2024 I was asked by Red Nose Australia to be an Ambassador. This was a super exciting opportunity to share the story behind My Little Star with a large audience. I was flown to Sydney and met with Teo Gebert (from Playschool) who is a fellow Ambassador and together we did a photoshoot for an article by NewsCorp that was published in newspapers around Australia.

Through the wonderful work of individuals around Australia My Little Star is often put in memory boxes and given to families who have lost a child or baby. In 2024 we raised $3542 for the Toowoomba Hospital Foundation to purchase My Little Star for memory boxes in the Toowoomba Region – you can donate to that cause here. My Little Star is being put into memory boxes in hospitals all around the country and I often hear from the families who have read this small piece of my heart and felt some form of comfort.