The Adventures of Bernie and Flora

Bernie is a bear and Flora is a duck. They are great friends who love to spend time together tending Bernie’s garden. The plot is simple – one day, Flora arrives to find that Bernie has disappeared, along with the flowers from his garden. After a mad romp around their friends, none of whom has any idea where Bernie might be, Flora returns to find that Bernie has been in his house all along. He had picked the flowers himself as a way of telling Flora that he loves her, and the story ends happily after she accepts his offer to move in with him and build more beautiful gardens.

The images are colourful and the story is short enough to read aloud in one sitting. What children might make of the saccharine content is another matter. There are some issues with tense usage, vocabulary and inconsistency of narrative which may well be attributable to the translation process, so the reader risks getting lost at a couple of points in the story.

That said, it is a happy book about kind, anthropomorphic characters. It is bright, cheerful and non-threatening, so will hold appeal to a certain young audience – just not those who like some scary tension in their bedtime stories.