Rock and Roll
Hazel Terry
Tiny Owl

The book reminded me slightly of Michael Foreman’s classic picture book The Two Giants.

Meet two boulders Rock and Roll, the former stands flat, the latter stands tall and so it has been in the mountains for countless years with both of them awestruck by the world’s magnificent beauty no matter the season, or be it day or night. 

Both are proud of how long they’ve’ stood and of the visual evidence of their endurance.

Then one fateful day everything changes: people come to visit Rock and Roll, delighting them and bringing them such gifts as flags, piles of small stones and necklaces of bunting. 

That is at first, but then each rock begins to resent the new adornments given to the other. Roll moans to the wind making unkind comments about Rock’s colourful flags: Rock in turn, talks to a cloud complaining about Roll’s crown and saying callous things.

Consequently wind and cloud become upset, bashing into one another and arguing about ‘their’ respective boulders.

A vicious storm of thunder and lightning strikes the boulders sending them hurtling down the mountainside breaking apart as they go.

Eventually all that remains of Rock and Roll are small pieces of detritus. With all those arguments having rolled far away, happiness comes in their place and with it, a sharing of the things that precipitated the fallout.

Not only is Hazel Terry’s debut picture book a thought-provoking fable with themes of jealousy and its consequences, and being in harmony with the self, with awesome fossil prints on every page, it’s a thing of real beauty. It truly celebrates the marvels of the natural world: indeed I was out with two young relations who were staying with us last week and one of the things that most excited them was discovering fossils in a Cotswold stream not far from my home. I can’t wait to show them this gorgeous book and to share it much more widely.