Ben's Magic Telescope

After first reading this magical book, I immediately turned back to the beginning for a more leisurely enjoyment of Patten’s poetic text matched with the Baileys’ beautifully crafted illustrations. Nine-year-old Ben lives in a tower block in a large, ugly city. Bored by the view, he wishes for something wonderful to happen. And because he makes this wish at a magical time, in a heap of rubbish he finds a silver telescope, carved with tiny images of the sun and moon. On the next page the colour palette changes, as the view through the telescope is seen brilliantly lighting up the centre of the spread. The lens powerfully picks up incredible details as Ben examines the distant market where his mother shops. The telescope shows ‘bumps on oranges, bruises on apples that look like maps’. Each vivid view through the telescope holds the reader’s eye, before drifting around the rest of the scene on the page, depicted in soft, muted tones. The illustrations serve to tell so much of the story that at times the text seems almost hidden, but on reading the words, one is held by the flowing, sparse yet glowingly descriptive prose. Ben looks through the telescope at his boring, everyday world, and it astonishes him. Beyond the factory chimneys he catches sight of the natural world, breathing, growing, flying, spinning, and, adjusting the telescope, finds he can see across oceans to a world of snow and glittering ice. The text changes into rhyming couplets before Ben stands, ‘exhausted and full to the brim with seeing so many miraculous things’. In reflective mood, he realises his eyes have been opened, that he will never see the world in the same way again. The book closes with a spiral sentence, asking if the reader spotted the centipede, pram, wheelbarrow, double rainbow, setting sun, an astronaut’s footprint … A wonderful book for reflection, a treasure for city and country child alike.