Picture books for ages 3 to 5

He can make the chowder. He can’t finish it alone.

Kettle is a small grey cat in an old painted fishing village on the edge of the Atlantic. He has one pot, one wooden spoon, and an empty cupboard — so every story starts with him going out to find the rest.

This opening film is a painterly atmosphere study made with AI video tools — mood, not a scene from any book. Kettle and the cove are their own hand-built cut-paper art, entirely human-authored. See the real art →

Scroll
How every story goes

It starts empty. It never stays that way.

By supper

The pot is full, and so is the kitchen.

Nobody in these stories is ever told what the lesson was. Kettle tries it his own way, it goes wrong in a small honest fashion, somebody knocks, and what he learns shows up in his hands. The last page is a question for your child, not a moral for you.

What would you bring?

Every story ends with an open pot. Leaving your address counts as bringing something.

One a story, never preached

A lesson you can actually name.

Every story carries exactly one, and it is always shown through Kettle getting it wrong first. Here are the first three.

All eight stories in the cove →

The quiet game in every story

You noticed first.

In every Heart’s ’Eh’ Plenty story there is one small thing Kettle does not catch. Your child often will. It is not a quiz and it is not a lesson — just a quiet beat left for the one watching closest.

Watch for it. Don’t tip them off. Let them be the one who says it first.

Before you hand it to a child

The lines these stories do not cross.

Everything we promise grown-ups →

The first book

The Empty Pot

Kettle sets out to make the best chowder in the cove and discovers his cupboard holds one potato and a lot of ambition. He cooks water. He serves it proudly. Nobody takes a second bowl. Then he knocks on one door.

Thirty-two pages, about five hundred words, with questions to ask afterwards and a glossary of Newfoundland words in the back.

Being illustrated now. Not yet on sale anywhere — when it is, the people on the list hear first.

Tell me when it’s out

Twenty-five seconds each

A first look at the weather.

Two short atmosphere pieces for the first two books — the cove before Kettle walks into it, and the fog that closes over it. No dialogue, no plot, nothing spoiled.

These are painterly atmosphere studies made with AI video tools, kept deliberately in a different register from the books themselves. Every page of every book is original cut-paper illustration, drawn by hand for this project. See the real art →

If your pot was empty tonight, whose door would you knock on?

That is how every story ends — with a question, handed to your child rather than answered for them.