El bosque

A colorful forest adventure

"El bosque" ("The forest") is a huge, colorful, cartonated leporello. When seeing it in a bookstore, I was first attracted to the sheer size of it - it is 35 cm. tall and folds out to almost four meters. This makes for some fun mediating options, because many children can play and read with it at the same time.

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But the generous size is not all this book has to offer. Ilustrator Sebastián Ilabaca from Chile has made a colorful, friendly world with tons of small details and interesting characters to explore. One side of the leporello happens in the forest, the other in a human world of houses and farms. To add interest, he has added a hole: A window on the "human" side, a hole in a tree on the "animal" side. That way, you can peek into the other world while you are exploring the first.

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The human side offers even more ways to connect with the animals. The pages have flaps, and when you lift them, you find animals: A goat hiding in the barn, a pig playing in the yard, two hens having a tea party...there are many to explore. The comic highlight is of course the flap that reveal a deer using the human toilet.

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As in any good wimmel-book there are endless stories to be told and things to be discovered. I like how the artists uses a string to create a four-page connection between some of the characters, a storytelling technique that is very popular in silent books.  The same is done on the "human" side, where two children are connected by a tin phone with a string stretching through three pages.

Most of the houses are portrayed like an open doll house, letting the reader explore both the interiors and the characters that live there. On both sides of the book are stories of love and friendship, disagreements, danger, laughter, play and so much more.