The Island

Three best friends, Moon Lady, Trunky (a little elephant) and Little Lion, live together in a land where they aren’t very happy. The land has no real colour, only greys and browns, and everyone wears dark clothes. As the three friends are colourful, the natives find them strange and rather shy, and they don’t tend to go out except at night. One day they decide to leave, so they take a boat to find a new home. The island they discover looks friendly when they see it from their boat, but in fact all the people there are made to dress in emerald green, and they aren’t friendly at all. One little man is terribly rude and puts them in a zoo, where they find lots of unhappy animals, painted green too. This is definitely not home. Their escape and their final finding of a home make up the remainder of this unusual picture book about the difficulties of being different. The illustrations in soft colours, made up of collage pictures of Victorian-looking photographs, as well as very large-eyed, appealing animals will need careful attention to the detail to get the most from them. The moral is an excellent one and timely in its emphasis on the differences in each of us that make life interesting and must be accepted happily.