Lost Property

What happens to all those small things that you can never find when you need them: the towel, when you come out of the shower; the ticket for the dry cleaners; the umbrella when it is raining? Ingman invites his readers to discover who is responsible for these mysterious disppearances in one particular family. This is a book that is an nostalgic as the Ahlbergs' Peepo! The clothes, the furniture, and the family snapshots (in black and white) suggest a world of thirty or forty years ago. And so does the style of the illustrations, using bold blocks of colour, ink line drawing, wax crayon, and occasional collage, so that there are echoes of Bemelmans and early Wildsmith. It is an artistic approach that is unusual nowadays, when picture books are often dominated by graphic design and pictorial narrative. Yet the careful composition of each page fits the episodic nature of the story, the characterisation is simple but deft, and there is a great deal for three- to seven-year-olds to enjoy in the images themselves and in Ingman's use of colour, texture, shape and space.