Tag a chase

The Hat that Zack Loves

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The Hat that Zack Loves
Michelle Robinson and Robert Reader
Puffin Books

There’s a satisfying circularity about Michelle Robinson’s new spin on the traditional The House that Jack Built.
It features Zack who buys the hat, a dog that snatches same and leads Zack in a merry dance down onto the subway; then into the park precipitating a frenetic concatenation of events wherein a host of other characters get involved.
There’s a cat, the wind, a grey goose and a policeman on horseback.
The whole chase is exhaustingly riotous, not least for Zack who falls from a tree;

then leaps into a boat in pursuit of his titfa.

But suddenly the wind takes over whisking it from the goose’s head, out of the park and up atop a statue, atop a column.

Will Zack ever get that elusive hat back? Or the whole thing just a wild goose chase?
Thanks to some nifty teamwork and precarious balancing, the hat is finally retrieved and then it’s hats all round.
This is a fun read aloud that, with its repeat refrain, ‘the hat that Zack loves’, cries out for audience participation.
Robert Reader debuts as a picture book artist with this rhythmic tale, gracing each spread with retro style scenes, every one of which has deliciously droll happenings that make you want to slow the pace and revel in the details.

I’ve signed the charter  

The Curious Case of the Missing Mammoth

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The Curious Case of the Missing Mammoth
Ellie Hattie and Karl James Mountford
Little Tiger Press
Strange stomping sounds from the street waken young Oscar from his slumbers and send him outside. There he encounters a mammoth that introduces himself as Timothy and asks the lad if he’s seen baby brother mammoth, Teddy. Teddy’s crashing and banging behind the bins gives away his hiding place; he dashes off to try and hide in the nearby museum with Oscar and Timothy hot on his trail.
What follows is a magical adventure inside The Curious Museum, a museum absolutely full of all manner of strange creatures including partying underwater animals and other unlikely things.
The hunt takes them into the dusty library crammed with fascinating books and bedecked with talking portraits.
The Flight Floor too is fascinating with its time line and portraits of aviators (good to see Bessie Coleman among them) …

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There’s no time to lose though; young Teddy is still on the loose and heading for the Time of Dinosaurs, where an invitation to take tea causes Oscar and Timothy to pause briefly …

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before they move on rather rapidly. Escaping down the lift shaft leads them to assorted creatures of the Extinct and Endangered kind. Oscar and Timothy watch them participating in an aerobics session; but will they ever find Teddy before the night ends?

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After the an initial breath-taking dash through this magical, pacey story, readers and listeners will most certainly want to go back and spend time exploring beneath the numerous flaps when they can absorb some fascinating facts about the plethora of creatures and other exhibits housed within that Curious Museum. Each spread is absolutely brimming over with details to amuse and delight. I can see it being read to destruction by enthusiastic explorers.

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Lucky Lazlo

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Lucky Lazlo
Steve Light
Walker Books
Lazlo is a young man in love. Hoping to surprise his sweetheart, who is starring in Alice in Wonderland, he buys her a beautiful red rose on opening night and dashes off to deliver it to her at the theatre. Unfortunately disaster strikes the love-struck lad en route, and the rose is stolen by a cat …

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The playful moggy leads Lazlo on a right merry dance as it dashes through the theatre backstage with the boy in hot pursuit. The resulting chase through pit, props, performers …

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and beyond is certainly a showstopper,

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with Lazlo stealing the limelight in a thoroughly satisfying finale.
Anyone familiar with Light’s previous Have You Seen My… ?  and Swap! books will know that intricately detailed black and white illustrations with judiciously placed splashes of colour is his signature style. Here, love seems to have resulted in Lucky Lazlo being flushed with colour throughout as well as more than one almost full technicolor double spread of the theatrical performance.

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In an afterword, Steve Light notes a number of superstitions related to the theatre and invites his audience to explore the pages again to discover all the rules that he has broken in the scenes.
Encore performances will definitely be the order of the day where this story is concerned.

The Queen’s Handbag

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The Queens’s Handbag
Steve Antony,
Hodder Children’s Books
There sits Her Majesty in the royal coach set to depart on her Great Britain tour when ‘swoosh!’ along comes a swan and away it swoops clutching her handbag firmly in its beak. Abandoning the coach, the Queen speeds off in her Aston Martin convertible hot on the trail of the sneaky thief all the way to Windsor Castle …

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and thence to Stonehenge.
From there it’s next stop Dover, followed by Oxford, Snowdonia, the Giants Causeway, Edinburgh Castle and all the way back to where she started. In the course of her break-neck chase Her Royal Majesty changes vehicle many times from motor bike, to Red Arrow plane, to penny farthing,

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then a parachute, a speedboat, a steam train

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– what an amazing acrobat she is – and a final gallop right back to London where she finds herself and the thieving bird caught up in the London Marathon. WOW! See her go …

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but can she catch that sneaky swan and retrieve the object of her chase? That would be telling wouldn’t it…
Delivered with considerable aplomb, and rendered in an appropriately regal colour palette, with a Union flag strategically placed in almost every location spread, not to mention a royal corgi, this is more than a worthy successor to The Queen’s Hat.
One cannot help but wonder just how many police officers got themselves involved in the chase (their antics are hilarious), and Her Majesty’s butler too makes a special appearance.
A laugh-on-every-page follow up to The Queen’s Hat and a veritable visual feast of British landmarks and the constabulary.

There’s an exciting event coming up in London on 23rd to 29th October: the Children’s Book Illustration Autumn Exhibition

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Use your local bookshop

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