26 Books

It’s only 6 January and I’ve already finished my first book of the year (two days ago, actually). And it was 704 pages long! Okay, so it was a book with particularly large type and many illustrations breaking up the text. Still, I think that’s pretty good going in four days.

I profoundly enjoyed the book when I began it. I was immediately drawn into the fantastical world of Zamonia with its tiny blue bear (our narrator) floating in a walnut shell on the high seas. I was ready for a contemporary fantasy tale in the tradition of Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland or Norton Juster’s brilliant The Phantom Tollbooth. This story is a fun, easy read but in my opinion a far less successful one than Caroll’s or Juster’s, two of my favourite childhood reads.

This is a German story translated into English. We learn that a blue bear has 27 lives and throughout the book Bluebear recounts half of his lives, one in each chapter. The early chapters are quick and enchanting, introducing the reader to mini pirates, talking waves, and an impressive island of treacherous gastronomic delights to name but a few.

As the book progresses, the chapters grow increasingly longer. The uneven rhythm is noticeable and vast parts of the story start to feel laboured. I was left wondering if the author wasn’t keen to achieve a certain page count so as to appeal to the children/adult crossover market as Harry Potter and the His Dark Materials trilogy have done. Bluebear even acknowledges in his thirteenth life not wanting to try the patience of those readers who are still with him.

This is an ideal bedtime read for parents with small children I think. Perhaps one chapter each night for those early, fast moving lives, and then natural breaks in the later longer-winded chapters.

I was excited by the look of the book. There are some lively drawings and clever uses of typography. There’s a lot more delight being taken in the design of contemporary books, as evidenced by Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (a book I hated so much I couldn’t finish it, incidentally, though it was beautiful to look at) or perhaps more surprisingly Umberto Eco’s recent The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, which I’ll be reading at some point this year. Picture books aren’t always just for kids.

But Captain Bluebear is one best suited to the little ones.

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