Today’s reading brings back some old friends. In Oliver Jeffers’s Where to Hide a Star, the boy plays hide-and-seek with his friends the star and the penguin, until one day the star cannot be found. The boy calls on the Martian, and together they fly to the North Pole on a rescue mission. What he finds there teaches him something new about friendship: the things we love most are sometimes meant to be shared.

The book was published in October 2024, twenty years after Jeffers’s first picture book, How to Catch a Star (2004). It reunites characters from his earlier stories: the star from How to Catch a Star, the penguin from Lost and Found, and the Martian from The Way Back Home. At 48 pages, it is longer than most picture books, which gives the story room to breathe. Jeffers has said that How to Catch a Star began with a memory of looking up at the stars from a jetty in Sydney. He was born in Australia, grew up in Northern Ireland, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Watch how Jeffers draws his boy: a round head, two dots for eyes, a single line for a nose, a striped shirt, and two thin blue legs. With almost nothing, he shows worry, hope, and relief. Notice too how lonely the empty white pages feel when the star is missing.

I shaped this episode around a “Sharing” arc: playing together, losing a friend, searching hard, and discovering that friendship can grow bigger than two.

Before recording, I made my index card as a tribute to the boy and his star. The boy’s round head is cut from my yellow-and-orange gelli-printed paper, his body is mottled pink, and he stands on two small blue legs, a nod to Jeffers’s own drawings. One long blue arm curls around him and reaches toward an orange star. They stand inside a red border with black dots, in my handmade red-and-black frame.

Watch the full episode, and then read it again together. Ask your child: who else might want a star for a friend?