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When it’s right, it feels right too!
This unusual picture book is all about the night and what it feels like at night if you’re a little girl (or indeed a little boy). It tells us how the spookiness of the dark can be banished if we keep something bright and glisteny with us. But if it turns out that ‘bright and glisteny’ doesn’t really go all that well with the night, then we can simply exchange it for something dark and cuddly and all of a sudden we realise that it feels just right…
In their picture book Eva Muggenthaler and Jürg Schubiger take children’s fear of the dark as their theme. Using big, strong images rather than lots of words they carry the reader into the world experienced by a little girl. During the night this little girl encounters bears whose job is to help her deal with the scary darkness of the night. The first of them is a white bear. He brings a bright glow with him that makes the darkness appear even darker. When he goes, he takes all the lights with him, and he even pockets the moon.
But the girl doesn’t feel at ease with this nocturnal companion: he takes up too much space, and he’s only out for himself. She lets him go, knowing that his kind of help was not the right sort for her. She’d already been expecting a black bear, and once he arrives everything is very different. He lets the night stay dark, for after all the night is dark — and so is he. Instead of putting himself at the centre of things he stays in the background as a kind of guardian angel on whose back the child can ride through the night or in whose arms she can go safely to sleep.
In her illustrations Eva Muggenthaler combines broad sweeps of bold colour with tiny, half-concealed details. She manages to blend the huge figures of the bears into her double-page drawings almost as though they were puzzle pictures. It’s sometimes helpful to hold the book at a bit of a distance in order to grasp the overall composition of the two facing pages. At the same time, though, you also have to look really closely to discover the little visual gags that are there for the finding on every page.
Jürg Schubiger’s text — especially the almost philosophical conversations between the child and her mother — likewise causes us to sit up and think. It is the perfect complementarity of word and image that makes the story what it is — neither would be effective without the other.
The full impact of this truly special book may well not be felt on a first reading — but there can be no doubt that it will invite a second, a fifth, even a twentieth reading!
Heike Friesel
July 2007
[Translated by Helena Ragg-Kirkby]
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