“Tuesday, 5th of October: winter is knocking on my door. I don’t want to freeze my toes off and be caged inside like last winter. If I could only rebuild my house to a van! Then I would drive to the south before the first snow comes. But I only have one wheel and I don’t think that the stubborn mule will pull the van without complaining.
Thursday, 7th of October: I didn’t see the fox around since weeks and our neighbour, the bear, did give a wide berth to the beehive. It’s alright with me! The chickens feel save again and I have enough honey for the approaching months. Now I’ll go in the forest to collect some mushrooms. A white deer just grazed underneath my window, the rest of its familiy is certainly not far. After collecting the mushrooms i’ll hide and wait, quiet as a mouse, till they’ll come within reach.”

This is taken from Max’s diary and these are the only words you’ll find in this amazing picture book. We’re going on an adventurous trip together with Max and his funny cap and there will finally be a way to escape from the upcoming winter. I was very surprised to find this book being released by a German publisher. It’s very unconventional in a way and normally German publishers don’t take the risk of publishing books like this. I think the market in France is still much more open minded when it comes to individual ways of storytelling.

I guess that there still is no English speaking publisher for this book, at least I couldn’t find anything. But now that I’ve translated the text for you you can also buy it in French, Catalan, German or Korean. You don’t really need the text anyway. I found another English review on this book here.

Don’t forget to check out the artists homepages: here you’ll find Marie Caudrys blog and here David Gauthiers homepage. “La balade de Max” was the first book they worked on together. Since then they did two more children’s books which you can also get here. “Bienvenue bébé” is the newest one which was released in France this month.

Get this book here or here.

© Julia Rothman 2007