Little Bo Peep’s Library Book
Little Bo Peep has, of course, lost her sheep. Perhaps the library has a book about how to find them. The helpful librarian, Mother Goose, directs her to lamb in the cooking section where she meets Big Bad Wolf (browsing through Basic Little Girl Cookery ) who follows her to the crime section (where the Queen of Hearts is engrossed in Mrs A. Summer’s Day’s Who Stole the Tarts ) and then the natural history section where she finds A. Shepherd’s How to Find Sheep . From the library shelves it is possible to retrieve and actually read these titles with their helpful hints (remove the rubber armbands, for example, before cooking Mary Mary à la Mer). Cowell plunges the reader into a most convincing nursery rhyme world that is wittily contextualised. Her fresh white pages with their quirky, knowing sheep trotting after Bo Peep are laid out with confident flair and her scratchy line illustrations with their textured wash sparkle with vibrant blues, pinks and greens. And the library setting! This book even has a date stamped library sticker and a cataloguing bar code. Some young readers might like to make their own miniature books to put on the library shelves, quite apart from joining their local library. While there are shades of the Ahlbergs in its genesis, Cowell succeeds in making this title very much her own. An outstanding book, let alone first book.