It's here! I'm very happy to announce the fourth adventure in the Stacey & the Museums series, Stacey Goes to the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum. This book was produced in collaboration with Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum.
While all my books are my babies, this new title means a little more to me. As an undergraduate studying Southeast Asian Studies in NUS, I did a project with archaeologist Prof John Miksic together with two friends. Our project was about the then Raffles Zoological Reference Collection, the pre-cursor of what LKCNHM is today. Back then, many of the specimens were kept in freezing cold cabinets and the smell of formaldehyde was strong. Our project was about how we envisioned a museum, if there would be one. Well, it's certainly nothing like how we imagined! :P It's such a pleasure to see how the museum turned out and a great honour to be asked by the museum to write this book. They were a real pleasure to work with.
This new Stacey title is conceptually a little harder than the earlier titles. I really wanted to pay tribute to the man who started it all, Sir Stamford Raffles, and I hope my readers will be able to appreciate why. I want kids to know Raffles was much more than the man their history or social study books teach! In this book, we also did a bit of time travelling and a complete scene change... two devices not used in previous Stacey books. I asked James whether he could use a more 'vintagey' colour scheme for the scenes in the Raffles Museum so that it will be clear that Stacey has gone to a different place. James has really done a marvellous job with this book - he clearly loves drawing animals!