The Snowman and the Sun

Translated from the original, the text in this picture book is unusual. There are only a few words on each page, often posing a ‘what if?’ Each spread is illustrated upon a squared grid, into and upon which perform the bizarre characters peopling this book. On the cover we meet the smiley snowman; with him is the boy, woolly hat in hand, whilst his smiley cat snuggles down… upon his head. High in the sunny sky buzzes the bee. When the story begins snowman, cat and bee are there, but joined by a quantity of gold fish, one of which has jumped up onto the snowman.  The reader hardly needs to read the text; (the sun melting the snowman, forming  water droplets, floating  up to become a cloud, returning to earth as snowflakes), for the pictures are quite strange and need studying to make meaning. The bee buzzes in the boy’s icecream cornet, the cat touches the cloud from the rooftop, bee buzzes by, this time riding a bicycle, and the cat grins at the goldfish as they swim by. The boy pulls the cat along in a cart, wearing different coloured shoes and sporting a multi-coloured-patterned umbrella to shelter from the snow, flakes now tumbling from the cloud. Big drifts of snow are pictured, fish buried deep, bee buzzing by on bicycle, cat’s tail sticking out of a snowdrift.  Maybe symbolism is intended; that attachments to people and inanimate objects can live on, even if no longer visible? The book would make a good introduction to the concept of the water cycle. Whilst there are lots of little mysteries in the illustrations, the quirkiness therein demands not only subsequent reads, but careful study of the characters and setting on each and every spread.