The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon

Mini Grey’s latest offering is an inventive take on the rags to riches theme, filled with references to the movies and needing to be read in your best Humphrey Bogart voice. This is what is sometimes referred to as the ‘post-modern’ picture book, full of irony and subtle references, fast moving and demanding considerable pictorial reading skills, which of course children today increasingly have. Spoon and Dish set out to seek fame and fortune across the water in the big city. They strike it big, blow their money on fast living, fall foul of a gang of money-lending knives, and turn to crime. It all goes wrong. Jailed, deported, reunited twenty-five years later, they discover the old showbiz skills are there. The book is laid out in semi-graphic novel format, much of the narrative content carried by small framed images and bands running alongside the main images. Great fun for the older child.