Rabbit, Alex’s favourite stuffed toy, has hopped out the
window and gone missing. It has been raining so much the river has burst its
banks and Alex’s mother has warned him not to go outside. But what can Alex do?
He must find Rabbit – and so he sets out in his watermelon boat.
Reading a Chris McKimmie picture story book is like dipping
into a dreamscape with all the richness of its symbolism blended with the
quirkiness of a story that is pure celebration of imagination. Each double-page
spread is a feast of activity to stir the senses and to spur creative thought,
to invoke the reader’s sense of connection to universal experience. Everything
on the page works to drive the story forward. And this includes the font, which
McKimmie has made an integral part of the marriage between text and
illustrations. To emphasise the wet weather, for example, the word ‘raining’
appears vertically, in groups, strategically placed in the shape of rain; the
word ‘overflowing’ drips over the line; and ‘heavy’ and ‘big’ are large and
bolded.
The illustrations – enticing, poignant, humorous and created
in McKimmie’s characteristic naïve style – invite the eye to roam the page for
further meaning and extra detail, often adding subtext to the story. As with
all of McKimmie’s books, each page is to peruse, to ruminate over, never to
turn quickly – even the double page spread of Alex in his watermelon boat ‘in
the red misty mountains, somewhere between here and there, in the middle of
nowhere’ followed by the dark wash of ‘And then all the lights in the world
went out’. (And haven’t we all been in that foreboding place sometime in our
lives?)
The story, inspired by McKimmie’s experiences in Brisbane
during the floods of January 2011, is true-to-life, engaging, touching, and
tempered by delightfully witty humour. Younger children will enjoy looking for
clues on each page, eager to help Alex in his search for signs of Rabbit. This
is a book that will provide rich opportunity for discussion between adult and
child – especially those who have experienced a flood. Like all of McKimmie’s
books, it is a story children will return to often.
Allen&Unwin 2012
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