The best thing about having this blog is that I’ve been receiving surprise books from around the world. They come all way across oceans- they must have to fly in planes or go on ships to end up in my tiny metal mailbox in my dirty apartment building in Brooklyn. This one came all the way from Estonia. (I had to wikipedia Estonia to refresh myself on where exactly it is on the map. I’m terrible at geography.) It’s in Estonian and there are not many easy Estonian translators on the web I could find- plus I’m not exactly sure how to make all those accent marks on my keyboard- so what I know of this children’s book is very little. From what I can gather it seems to be based on Tangrams– an ancient Chinese puzzle game that you probably played as a kid. Tangrams start as a box broken into seven shapes. You use those shapes to create an image you are given. You can play a game of it right here- it’s kind of harder than I remember. The illustrations in this book are full of tangram animals and it seems to be a story about them. In the back of the book there’s a tangram you can cut up and use to recreate all the animals in the story. I like the elements the illustrator Anne Pikkov used to create the small scenes. There’s lots of irregular handmade looking shapes filled with very digital looking patterns and the characters are quite expressive even though their features are fairly simple. If you want to try and find this book the ISBN number is 978-9949-15-538-5 or just contact the illustrator Anne Pikkov here. Thanks Anne for sending!

© Julia Rothman 2007