Mr Search and Mrs Find

Take a look in this book and you will find grids of something like 1800 squares in every opening, each one filled with sketches of houses, skyscrapers, cars, buses, curious little people with all sorts of different characteristics… The reader’s task is to find Mr Search and Mrs Find, hiding in plain sight among these odd creatures and other sketches. Which is the most challenging, the forest or the abstract lines, squares and people?

Each double page opening has a different theme: for instance opening four is a double page spread where all the cells are crowded with planets, spaceships, comets and suchlike, all drafted in such a way that most of them look like Mr Search or Mrs Find. Is that Mrs Find on the left hand page on the second row? No – and there are others that look like that all over the spread. (And yes, I did find her but I’m not going to say where).

This is an engrossing book: funny; challenging; at times infuriating; at every page beautifully designed.

The ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ of the two characters might seem unnecessary and add nothing to the story, but that one thing to the side, the creator CSIL (as elusive as her characters) has made a book that many children will spend time with, arguing with friends, racing to find the characters and coming back to frequently.

There are solutions at the end, by the way.