Tag: bicycles

Blue Whale Blues, by Peter Carnavas

I’ve got the Blue Whale Blues,
I’ve got the Blue Whale,
BLUE WHALE BLUES.

Whale is singing the blues. He’s sad because he doesn’t know which was the bike he found goes. Luckily his good friend Penguin is there to help him turn it up the right way. But with that problem fixed, Whale finds another, and another. Finally comes the biggest problem of all, when the friends set out to ride thier ‘bike’ and discover that it isn’t a bike at all, but an abandoned shopping trolley.

Blue Whale Blues is a humorous story about friendship and imagination which will have youngsters laughing out loud – and probably telling Whale and Penguin of their mistake long before they realise it for themsleves, with a little help from their friend Turtle. The repeated refrain will encourage them to join in singing the Blue Whale Blues, and the illustrations, using watercolour, collage and digital techniques, will delight.

Lots of fun for preschoolers but adults will smile too.

Blue Whale Blues, by Peter Caranavas
New Frontier, 2015
ISBN 978192505941

Ride, Ricardo, Ride! by Phil Cummings & Shane Devries

Ricardo laughed.
The breeze brushed his face
and the air smelled of wildflowers.
Ricardo rode every day …
Until the shadows came.

When his father gives him a bike, Ricardo loves to ride it, hearing his father say ‘Ride, Ricardo, ride.”. But, when the shadows come, his father tells him they must hide the bike so it is not taken away. Together, father and son dismantle the bike and hide it away. In the dark times that follow, Ricardo loses his father to the shadows, and there are many hardships. But, when at last the shadows go away, he finds his bike, rebuilds it just as his father would have done, and rides once more, hearing the echo of his father’s voice encouraging him to ride.

Ride, Ricardo, Ride! is a moving tale of wartime hardships and survival, as well as of love between father and child. Set in an unnamed village impacted first by the arrival of soldiers, who appear only as shadows and then by the destruction of war.

A highlight of this very moving offering is the way that both text and illustrations explore the impact of war without using the images or words so often encountered in such stories, with the result of drawing the reader in to the impacts of what is happening, rather than focussing on the violence itself. The digital illustrations have a rich depth with smaller, ink-style illustrations in many of the text-boxes adding to the historical feel of the book.

This is a rich, moving feast of a book.

Ride, Ricardo, Ride!, by Phil Cummings & Shane Devries
Omnibus, 2015
ISBN 9781742990736

Available from good bookstores and online.