Under the spell of the moon
by IBBY (editors)
Various illustrators
Fifteen percent of the cover price of this book is going to the International Board of Books for Young People. This is an excellent organisation, which seeks to promote understanding between nations by bringing together everyone interested in children and their welfare and the way the books they read can influence their lives and futures.
The idea of finding an artist from each country and asking them to illustrate a rhyme, or a street song, or a poem that they enjoy is a brilliant one, and if the poems they've chosen occasionally seem slight, it's often either because the translation is just that: a translation and sometimes much is lost even when the words are quite accurate. I can vouch for the Spanish and French and can just about decipher the Hebrew and in each case, there is a certain something that's absent from the English version, but it's nothing to get het up about and the pictures, which are the point of the exercise, are so glorious that every child will find something to admire and pore over.
It's fascinating to see the differing styles each nation produces, and naturally the culture each artist belongs to pervades their pages in the book. I particularly loved the Iranian artist Nasrin Khosravi and Carll Cneut of Belgium reinforced one of my beliefs about his country: that there's a streak of surreality, of strangeness behind the bourgeois faŠade it presents to the world. Anthony Browne and Quentin Blake represent Great Britain and we can be proud of both of them. Browne's Birthday Cake rhyme was especially enjoyable.
All in all, it's a lovely book for a class to have on its shelves. Reading it, admiring the pictures, discussing each country as you turn the pages is a good way of showing children how various and beautiful the planet is; how important it is to know the way other peoples live and think.
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