Description
-Have you seen the lion? -the frog asked-. I’ve brought him a letter that smells of fresh grass and freshly cut flowers.
This formula, full of lyricism, is repeated to all the animals the frog meets, the album completing page by page a type of puzzle with the creatures in the jungle, whose answers become small clues.
The answers reveal details that will lead the tireless amphibian to discover the lion’s whereabouts at the same time increasing his curiosity and that of the inhabitants of the jungle and the readers’ to discover the motive why the lion only runs and runs; doesn’t hunt nor eat and, above all, his insistence on reaching the moon.
The Venezuelan-Uruguayan writer Armando Quintero has a long and recognized career as an oral narrator. This experience is evident in the narrative tension he has incorporated in Have you seen the lion?, this album being his second collaboration with OQO his first being Snails, the collection for first readers in nanOQOs.
The lion’s strange behaviour has everyone intrigued: to reach the moon seems to be the intention of someone who is mad or a feat of someone in love. Aimed at reflecting their confusion, the illustrator Géraldine Alibeu presents the animals in the jungle in static poses and reduces to the limit the palette of colours. Thus, transmitting the inability of these, the frog included, to explain what is happening to the lion they fear unhinged.
On the other hand, Géraldine Alibeu reserves the illustrations in movement and greater chromatics for the lion. This way, she looks to create an atmosphere in which urgency is breathed and the amorous motif of the same. Besides, these images do not have any text, meaning the reader must enter the land of suppositions to unravel what is happening to the disturbed King of the Jungle.
The French illustrator includes the readers in the game being one more in the investigative wanderings and can recognize themselves, as if it were their alter ego, in the little Masai native constantly present in the book. This boy follows the development of the story relaxed and happy, but very attentive, like all those who enter in this plastic collage and narrative that show how the most beautiful demonstrations of love do not need epic exploits.
Text by Armando Quintero
Ilustrations Géraldine Alibeu
From the Spanish translation by Mark W. Heslop
