Age 5+

Browne’s latest masterly picturebook is about a boy who finds one morning that his father has gone and that his mother’s face is sad. In a variation on Little Red Riding Hood, the boy, missing his father, walks through the bare winter forest to visit his granny. The forest is peopled with unhappy children from three fairy tales — expressing both his fears, and his desire for escape. Unusually, imagination is represented in grey and is obsessively detailed, while reality is in colour and more simple — a brilliant way of conveying psychological anxiety. With each page, expectations of the plot and our view of what is happening shift, as Browne plays with children’s knowledge of Little Red Riding Hood to set up suspense, before a happy resolution. The great game in this book, though, is to identify, among the phenomenal minutiae of the forest (in which every inch of bark and every fallen leaf is separately drawn), hard-to-discern clues about 10 fairy tales. This fascinating book, for any child old enough to be familiar with the fairy stories, yields more with each reading, and should encourage children to look attentively and think about motives and meanings.

(Walker £12.99)

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