Nils MohlHalina Kirschner
Wilde Radtour mit Velociraptorin
[Wild bike ride with a lady velociraptor]

Wilde Radtour mit Velociraptorin (‘Wild bike ride with a lady velociraptor’) - an unusual picture book by Nils Mohl and Halina Kirschner offering a child-friendly mix of three different genres: adventure, technical savvy, and word-play

Okay, there’s no denying it: the author of these present lines is just a little bit green with envy: he has been poddling around the place for more than thirty years now astride his comfy city bike with its 8-speed hub-gearing, always nice and slowly, in the process encountering all manner of living creatures - human beings, farm animals, hover flies, wild rabbits, grass snakes, slugs - but he has never happened on the creature that the writer Nils Mohl encountered on a completely routine outing on his beloved bicycle: a velociraptor; a species extinct for zillions of years, but suddenly alive and well and happy as Larry in the here and now - and just as fleet-footed as ever it was. Nils Mohl swears to the truth of it, and his description of events makes it entirely credible.

He has turned this encounter into a book, Wilde Radtour mit Velociraptorin, in which he manages to kill several birds with one stone. For one thing, he offers us a cheerful adventure story, illustrated by Halina Kirschner with equally cheerful cartoon-like drawings in which the dominant colours are bright green and magenta. In addition - or we might say: by way of asides as he trundles along - he expatiates on various useful technical terms relating to bikes and thereby ultimately encourages his young readers  to share the joy he takes in playing around with letters and words until suddenly a cheery alphabet explodes onto the page (‘A … as in Adventure’, ‘P … as in Poetry and Protest’, ‘Z … as in Zoom’).
In order to bring that off he first has to introduce his three protagonists. – Firstly: himself, as he sits there at his desk vainly racking his brains in search of a story line, before finally resorting to a subterfuge that has always served him well in such predicaments, namely hopping onto his bike and going off for a ride. - Secondly: the bicycle itself; known in francophone countries as a ‘vélo’, originally ‘vélocipède’ meaning literally ‘fleet of foot’. - Thirdly: the velociraptor, who is towing a bike trailer when they first meet. ‘Velociraptor’ translates more or less as ‘speedy robber’, and amongst the reptiles of the prehistoric era it counted so to speak as the ‘speed machine’. If like Nils Mohl you are a super-vigilant writer who can hear a flea coughing, and can then instantly toss off a poem about fleas, then you could easily happen to stumble on a prehistoric dinosaur while out on a bike ride - in this instance a female example of the species at once friendly and extremely inquisitive.

In the event of writer’s block it is generally speaking a wise ploy to just hop on your bike and go for a ride, off to where the air is fresh and pure, where it wafts through areas of the brain and central nervous system that have grown torpid, and in so doing helps to inspire new ideas. Then: off you go, get pedalling! A as in Adventure and joyous Activity. In the margins of the story, biking terms beginning with the relevant initial letter are explained in child-friendly language in a distinctive bright green font. Within the narrative text itself the language is scoured for words starting with the appropriate letter of the alphabet. In the case of the letter A the opening ten lines of the story contain more than a dozen words beginning with an A (als, Ach, Arbeit, Autor, anstrengend, anfangen, aber, auch, Ausweg, Aufstehen, an, ab, allein, Abwechslung). On with the motley!

The writer is still busy pumping up his tyres when he hears the ringing words ‘Stop right there, champ!’ With the velociraptor continuing in the same jovial vein they take off on their cross-country odyssey on firm paths and tracks, up hill and down dale, delighting all the while in the wonderful world of cycling. And the stronger the breeze as they proceed, the more the letters of the alphabet shake themselves free of the inert convolutions of the writer’s brain. As with the letter A, the same pattern continues for page after page until they finally zoom and zip their way back to the writer’s home: ouf! - or should that be ‘Zounds!’

Everyone ends up happy: the writer, as he can at last get his adventure down on paper in a stress-free frame of mind; the velociraptor, who can regard herself as a Queen of the Road now that Nils Mohl has taught her all she ever needs to know about cycling; and not least the children reading the book, who have witnessed a thrilling cycle trip, learned some basic facts about bikes, while also getting a solid grounding in alphabet-acrobatics and becoming fancy-free neophytes in the fun-filled art of juggling with words and letters.
By way of a PS: those who translate this unusual, topsy-turvy adventure story will surely also have lots of fun recreating its alphabetic high jinks in their own languages! Best of luck to them!