Imaginata Children's Books in Order

Imaginata Children's is best thought of as a small imaginative umbrella rather than a single continuing storyline. These books are picture-book sized, but they are built with the same visual care Uvi Poznansky brings to her fiction and artwork. Rhythm, color, and feeling do a lot of the storytelling.

Jess and Wiggle is the lighter, more playful side of the pair. Jess is a solemn little girl who does not easily smile, and Wiggle is a mischievous ribbon-like companion who keeps trying to draw her into movement, surprise, and laughter. The fun comes from repetition, visual invention, and the slow breaking of Jess's seriousness.

Now I Am Paper turns gentler and more wistful. It follows the voice of an old tree that remembers the girl who once climbed its trunk and rested in its branches. When the tree is eventually cut down and turned into paper, the story becomes a quiet meditation on change, loss, rebirth, and the strange comfort of having a story survive in a new form.

These books are small, but they linger.

What links them is not recurring plot so much as sensibility. Poznansky writes in a lyrical, visual way, and her illustrations are part of the meaning, not mere decoration. In Jess and Wiggle, play and color do the work of opening a guarded child. In Now I Am Paper, watercolor images and poetic lines give a simple premise surprising emotional depth.

She also created animated versions of both books, which fits the handmade feel of the series. Even on the page, though, you can sense motion. The pictures want to move, the lines want to be spoken aloud, and the stories invite rereading.

The tone is gentle enough for children, but there is substance underneath it. One book is about joy arriving through play. The other is about the cycle of life, told in a way that stays accessible without talking down to young readers. Adults reading aloud will probably notice that these stories hold more feeling than their short length first suggests.

If you come to this series expecting a conventional sequence, you may be surprised. What you get instead is a pair of artful, imaginative books that invite children to look closely, listen to the sound of the words, and follow an idea a little farther than they expected. That makes Imaginata Children's feel less like a brand and more like a little studio of handmade stories.