The Lumberjack's Beard by Duncan Beedie

The Lumberjack's Beard by Duncan Beedie
Buy The Lumberjack's Beard by Duncan Beedie at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: For Sharing,
Reviewer: Ruth Ng
Summary: Delightfully silly beard shennanigans!
Buy? yes	Borrow? yes
Pages: 40	Date: January 2017
Publisher: Templar Publishing
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 9781783706884
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Jim Hickory is a Lumberjack of routine. Every morning, after he gets up, he does his limbering up exercises (very important for a lumberjack!), then he eats his breakfast of pancakes with maple syrup, before finally getting his trusty axe and heading out into the forest. One day, however, this routine becomes interrupted when he hears someone peck-pecking at his door, only to discover it's a small owl who has been made homeless by Jim's tree felling. Jim allows the owl to set up home in his big bushy beard, without realising just quite what he is letting himself in for…

You can probably imagine that once he has an owl living in his beard, poor old Jim the Lumberjack soon finds that there are other animals who have been made homeless by his actions too. He does have an extremely large beard, fortunately, though I did wonder quite how he manages to fit an owl, and a porcupine, and a beaver in there! With the influx of animal residents his routine starts to fall apart, and Jim is sleeping less, unable to perform his exercises, and the bird poo on his shoulder puts him right off his big stack of pancakes! Never fear! Jim is a resourceful man, and he soon figures out a new temporary home for his friends, as well as a more long-term solution.

This is a sweet story, both funny and charming, and with a nice environmental message too. The illustrations compliment the story perfectly, and I really liked the variety of full page images with panel pictures, split pages and different shapes and sizes of image. Jim is a funny character, with his enormous beard, and also his rather overdeveloped upper body in comparison with a pair of very spindly legs! I like that he has no mouth for most of the book, since it's covered up with his beard, and so all his expressions must come from his eyes and his body language. The animals who set up home in his beard are also sweetly drawn. The owl has round black spectacles, and I loved that she turned up at Jim's house with a shopping trolley in which she's got her knitting!

One of my favourite pages is towards the end and shows a picture for each season of the year, where we see Jim and his friends all waiting for a new tree to grow. The animals are doing something different in each image, from playing cards, to listening, to sunbathing and listening to a walkman! There's lots to see throughout, and it's easy to imagine the landscape of Jim's home, with the beautiful images of a huge forest surrounded by mountains. The beard becoming a home is nonsense, of course, but it's just the sort of nonsense that small children love, and that will leave them on the lookout for overly large beards in the future, just in case there are any creatures living in there!

Further reading suggestion: For more fun with facial hair try Eleanor's Eyebrows by Timothy Knapman and David Tazzyman or you might also enjoy the illustrative delights in The Lonely Beast by Chris Judge.

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You can read more book reviews or buy The Lumberjack's Beard by Duncan Beedie at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy The Lumberjack's Beard by Duncan Beedie at Amazon.com.

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