Be Wild, Little One

‘Wake up early, don’t be shy/This bright world can make you fly’ – the opening couplet sets the tone as author and illustrator join to encourage the young reader to enjoy the world imaginatively – and as the title page image suggests – in reality. This is not a story narrative though the reader is taken on a journey. Rather it is a poem – indeed the text could feature in an anthology very successfully without any imagery, the words direct, vivid, rhythmical, the rhymes unforced and natural. However, here they have Daniel Egnéus to add another dimension – the visual, enhancing and expanding the image created by the verbal. His bold, unsaturated colours sing off the page, each spread carefully linking into the world created by the poet’s words – the greens of the jungle, the yellow of the desert sands, the snow filled landscape where wolves roam. There are surprises – there are no ships crossing the seas, instead we fly with the geese and are tossed in a basket under a dandelion clock in the face of a storm. The child could be any child – young readers whoever they are able to see themselves in these pages – the final spread a triumphant exhortation in words and picture – ‘Be Wild, Little One’.