Floppy's Friends

This book tackles the theme of encouraging children (or in this instance, young rabbits of different colours and sizes) to integrate rather than segregate. Floppy always plays with everyone, regardless of their colour and wishes the other rabbits would do the same instead of sticking to their own colour groups. He welcomes someone new who looks different: ‘He wasn’t white and he wasn’t grey. He wasn’t brown and he wasn’t black. He was dappled brown and white.’ Floppy introduces himself and they play together but when the other rabbits come over to see what’s going on, they start calling the new rabbit ‘Spotty’. Floppy tells them to stop and announces that his new friend, Samy, knows a really cool game. ‘Oh yeah! What’s that?’ ‘Fly-a-carrot-kite-leapfrog-on-the-train with a skip, stop and whistle,’ replies Floppy, putting together everybody’s games.

Full colour illustrations go across each double-page spread and the text in both languages fits wherever there is space enough for it – which on some spreads is too little. This gives quite a few of the pages a rather crowded look. That said, one could argue that the bold pictures clearly convey the story – and this is after all a book to be read aloud to children, with the purpose of discussing with them the moral message contained within. The narrative intention is a worthy one, undoubtedly, but how successfully illustrations and text combine to achieve it, I’m not sure. (Available in 22 dual language editions.)