Lentokala

I had a stopover at Helsinki airport this summer, and made a visit to their bookstore. There was only one row of picturebooks, so my hopes of finding anything interesting was low, but in between the rather boring, run-of-the-mill books typical for airport stores, this wonderful gem of a wordless book appeared. What are the odds?

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Made by Finnish author and illustrator Sanni Tervo, this book is like a small explosion of imagination, beauty and joy. Tervo has made a truly magical universe where goldfish can grow butterfly wings, dragons can cry until the house floods and the strangest creatures can hide in the cellar.​ The story can be interpreted in a mulitude of ways, there is the power of friendship, the strenght of wishes, the need to let loved ones go, the possibilites of working together, there is mystery and sorrow and joy and adventure. All enchanced by Tervo´s illustrations: At her webpage, she tells of her love for the weird and whimsical, a love that is very visible in her work!

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The illustrations looks to have been made using color pastels. There is something about the style and color choices that gives a vintage feel, a reminiscence of the gorgeous illustrations of old fairytale books. As so many great silentbook authors, Tervo uses the whole layout of the book to tell her story, but she does it with more variation than most! There are doble-page spreads, oval pictures, collections of 2, 3, 4 and 6 pictures in cartoon-like panels and almost dreamlike sequences where the characters seem to flow through the page. It should feel chaotic, but somehow she makes it work, and it adds both to both the understanding of the story and the originality of the book.

 

One of my favourite spreads is this, where the pattern of the six-image panel is broken by the goldfish sticking his head up by the top right picture, emphazising the strength of his longing for freedom - it literally breaks the frame.