"Half for you and half for me Between us two shall goodwill be."

Here is a nursery rhyme book to entertain both adult and child as they read together. The classic rhymes are side by side with annotations about their backstories: Who was Wee Willie Winkie? Did live blackbirds really fly out of a pie? Was Humpty Dumpty a person -- or a clumsy cannon?

When she was small, Katherine Govier tucked in close to her mother's side to listen to nursery rhymes. Later she read them to her own children, and now she has returned to reading them with her mother, who can no longer see well enough to read the pages of their nearly hundred-year-old Mother Goose book. Still, her mother can recite the words. What is the magic and what is the meaning of these rhymes that stay in our heads for a lifetime?

The answers are here. Some rhymes describe historical events and some are just plain nonsense. Some of the oldest rhymes were never intended for the nursery, but for the street -- where they came to life as popular judgments on events of the day. In Half for You and Half for Me, the author breaks the codes of these nursery rhymes in accessible, amusing explanations. She also adds some classic Canadiana, including a poem by star children's poet Dennis Lee.

Commissioned illustrations make this book full of color to draw in the eye. Charming vintage drawings also pepper the text, firmly rooting the rhymes in their historical context.

Half for You and Half for Me will engage, delight, entertain and inform younger and older readers alike, and aims to be that favourite title that is pulled off the family shelf again and again.

Katherine Govier is the author of twelve novels including, The Ghost Brush, which has been translated into French, Spanish and Japanese. Her novel Creation, about John James Audubon in Labrador, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2003. She has also won Canada's Marian Engel Award (1997), the Toronto Book Award (1992), and has twice been shortlisted for the Trillium prize. Today she is the founder and Director of The Shoe Project, working to improve the written and spoken English of immigrant women. Katherine travels often between Toronto and Canmore, Alberta.

Sarah Clement is a graduate of Langara College and Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She has participated in solo exhibitions in Vancouver, and, most recently, in Berlin, where she lived for the past year. Sarah takes her inspiration from the natural world and is interested in telling visual stories through whimsy and detail.