Blue Badger and the Big Breakfast

This is an unusual children’s book.  There are four animals involved: Badger, Squirrel, Dog, Bird and Owl.  Badger is eating a huge breakfast of blueberries, and he is too busy eating to help his friend Dog find his lost ball.  He encounters the other animals though, and wise Owl, who is very into aphorisms, tells him to ‘look into himself’ for the answer about the lost ball.  Badger then cogitates and comes to the conclusion that he has eaten the blue ball amidst all the blueberries!  When he confesses to dog what he has done, he and dog begin throwing the blueberries as though they are balls and are soon friends again.  Either this is the world’s smallest ball, or Badger has been eating the world’s largest blue berries, either way, this is not a book that is easy to understand.  The illustrations are splendid, with solid coloured backgrounds to the large central animals, and there is a ‘knowingness’ about the partly-rhyming text that would take a sophisticated child to pick up on.  A bit of a ‘curate’s egg’.