Have You Heard?
Hannah Dale
Words & Pictures

With echoes of the traditional Chicken Licken and the falling sky, Hannah Dale has cooked up a rhyming beauty.
A fox – a big red one – is on the prowl; that’s what Mouse decides when he’s awoken from his slumbers one night.
He tells the ‘sleepy, slimy’ frog who passes the news to sparrow, who informs squirrel, who tells owl and owl tells hedgehog

and so on …

until,  so rooster cautions goose, “His claws are like needles, his eyes shine like lights And he’ll eat you up in THREE BIG BITES!”
This well-constructed dialogue poem wherein the fox’s fearsome nature is elaborated upon by each woodland creature in turn, demonstrates the consequences of such speculative chitchat.
Hannah Dale’s beautiful and realistic watercolour paintings capture so well the growing alarm that seizes the animals until all is finally revealed (to readers, though perhaps not the panic-stricken characters herein) in a glorious culmination that will melt your heart.
A captivating read aloud treat.

I’ve signed the charter