Jenny Meilihove

 

Jenny Meilihove, who was born in Russia and emigrated to Israel in 1993, is a graduate (2008) of Illustration in the Visual Communication track at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. She is a children’s book illustrator with a great love for creating worlds of imagination and magic. Jenny has written and illustrated three award-winning children’s books. Her book Tim Tam and the Dots won the Israel Museum Prize for Illustration (2024). In addition to children’s books, Jenny illustrates newspapers and children’s games. She lives in Israel with her two children.

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Tim Tam and the Dots

Picture Book

Publisher: Am Oved

Year: 2023

34 pp.

 

Translation rights: World

Audio visual rights: World

Translation: English translation by Annette Appel available

 

Tim Tam is a young ladybug who still doesn’t have her own dots. She sets out with her mother to find some, and with each dot she finds, she grows and becomes a little more independent. A book about growing up and gaining independence, accompanied by artistic illustrations that invite children to find the next dot themselves. The book won the Israel Museum Prize for Illustration (2024).

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Critical Praise

 

Tim Tam, a black beetle wearing a red dress, is a one-of-a-kind heroine who “goes out with Mom to collect dots”… From page to page, Tim Tam grows to become the “searching champion”, until she grows up, and now she is the one who gives the dots to others.

Yuval Saar, Portfolio

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The book masterfully shifts between simplicity and complete innocence to sophistication and subversion, all in three colors, with formal elegance and astonishing lightness. The meticulous illustration allows for additional narratives and interpretations that do not contradict each other, but rather turn the book into a sequence of puzzles that enrich the readers and invite them to play with the storyline, disrupt the order, and flip back and forth. On another, more subtle level, it seems that Meilihove, the illustrator and author, has written a story where the heroine herself appears as a black dot searching for and finding the black dots in her world, thus offering toddlers a contemporary story that also contains the potential for a new, beautiful perspective on political and gender interpretation.

Jury of the Israel Museum Prize for Illustration

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