Never Ever

This is the same basic story as Rosie’s Walk, except here the unflappable protagonist is a little girl clutching her favourite floppy rabbit soft toy, and the exciting environment she walks through has none of the toy town familiarity of Pat Hutchins’ farmyard and its animals. Here there are flying pigs, a sleeping gorilla, a roaring lion, turtle stepping stones in the river, a hungry dragon, who swallows our blasé heroine into a memorable double page of darkness, and finally, a fold out woolly mammoth. While the precisely outlined (almost mechanical) world of Rosie’s Walk suited that tale, so Jo Empson’s freer style with extensive use of colour wash and eccentric characterisation – the little girl’s legs like coiled red springs, and her spiky crayoned hair barely trapped in a ribbon – is perfect for this off the wall version. Whereas you might believe that Rosie really did not see anything unusual in her walk, this little girl, roared at by a lion and burped out by a dragon, is surely kidding the reader and underlining her adventurous credentials, celebrating her survival, or just being plain toddler perverse, when she claims that ‘nothing exciting EVER happens to me.’ I love its verve and fun, not sure about the fold-out mammoth, though.