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The animals that Boy meets are interesting and unusual - a sabre-toothed tiger, a woolly mammoth and a dinosaur, and they allow for plenty of discussions later. My little girl was interested in the cave drawings of those animals on the walls of Boy's home, so it was fun to talk with her about how history was recorded many, many years ago. The book's illustrations are wonderful, soft pastel drawings with pleasing colours and some gorgeous skies. Because the writer has illustrated the book himself the pictures seem to work especially well together with the text.
There's one page where the boy, after discovering that a warm volcano is perhaps not the safest place to snuggle down, is running back to his home and the pictures are panels across the page so we see him running back past the dinosaur, back past the mammoth, back past the sabre toothed tiger, revisiting all the places he's been. This is the same format as we see in [[We're Going on a Bear Hunt by MIchael Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury]], and it always seems to work well with younger tots as they love that repetition and the way it reinforces what they've just seen happen in the story. A lovely story to share with both boys and girls.
I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to the Bookbag.