Elys Dolan's Reading List

"Super Happy Magic Forest: Slug of Doom by Matty Long is a fabulous parody of fantasy tropes and it’s one of those most rare things—it’s a sequel that is better than the original. But this book is all about detail, and the detail is marvellous. You can spot all the little sub-plots going on next to the main plot and all of these little one-off jokes and asides create a really interesting, fully formed, fully functional —full of rivalries, relationships, misunderstandings, disasters, heroics and mishaps that take place within it. Your eye can scan the bustling double-spreads, making new discoveries and find new funny bits with every re-reading."

"This is a book from my childhood. And I find it as funny now as an adult as I did back then. But perhaps for different reasons. One of the things I love about it now is the way it takes the conventions of the picture book – the usual order being a title page, contents page etc – and turns these conventions on their heads. So the chicken turns up on the contents page flapping about and eventually gets squashed by it. The book is almost a character—certainly it is very much the landscape of the story. “This book is all about detail, and the detail is marvellous” The children listening to (or being read) this story are in on the joke, they know that this is not the correct telling of The Gingerbread Man which is the important thing. They know that everything in this book has been turned it’s head and not as it should be. The kids understand this which gives them a slight edge of superiority. Often there is an edge of superiority when it comes to getting a joke."

"Yes! It’s the characterisation which is so very good in this book. There is so little in this book apart from the pigeon trying to convince you (the reader) to let him drive the bus. It’s so simple and yet so expressive. It shows what can be done with just a few lines and a limited palate, and bags of talent! The huge range of emotions, how exaggerated they are: the pigeon does everything from pleading, to going into a massive rage, to trying to bribe you with a fiver, to downright manipulation: “Your mum would let me.”"

"The thing that makes this so clever is the way he uses counterpoint between the words and the images. We see that the fish has stolen a hat. The words simply tell us what the fish is thinking. So we can clearly see that this fish has totally misjudged the situation (and this is about being in on the joke again). We know from the pictures that this story is not going to end well for this fish. The fish knows he has done something bad so he subjects the reader to a lot of self-justification. The timing is almost perfect. It is perfect. I love the moment when the fish tells us that someone has seen him but that he knows this individual (a crab) won’t tell. And the very next page is the crab pointing to where he has gone. “Talking about humour is like dissecting a frog: the process is horrible, and at the end the frog has died” The page thing is so clever and bold—the first double spreads are just the big fish—I mean this is a lot of storytelling space to use up when you’ve only got 24 pages to play with. These first spreads are simply the big fish waking up and the only thing that changes is his eye. This slow pacing at the beginning and those slight changes show us just how much trouble the little fish is going to be in and what a threat the big fish is. If Klassen hadn’t set it up like this in the beginning that joke may not have worked. But it does."

"Yes! And there are a couple of levels on which it works well. He takes Father Christmas, a figure we know so well: he is big and jolly, he has reindeer, he lives on the North Pole, he has elves. But Raymond Briggs tells us that Father Christmas, in fact, lives in a terrace house with a dog and a cat and is a miserable old sod. So we begin with this brilliant bit of incongruity, the mixture of Father Christmas and just normal everyday life that we can all recognise. Then Briggs asks how might Father Christmas act in these ordinary situations. The reason I like Father Christmas Goes on Holiday so much is that, for example, putting him on a lilo a Las Vegas swimming pool is about as far from our conventional idea of Father Christmas as it is possible to get. “Father Christmas goes to a French campsite and gets diarrhoea, then he goes to Vegas and gets horribly drunk” The other thing Briggs is so brilliant at is observational comedy—he shows us how ridiculous life can be. So Father Christmas goes to a French campsite and gets terrible diarrhoea, then he goes to Vegas and gets horribly drunk, overdoes it, is shocked by a huge bill and gets sunburnt! I’m not sure that getting drunk in Vegas happens to everyone but a lot of it is stuff that happens to ordinary people and Father Christmas reacts as they would. It is funny because he is Father Christmas. Especially for a child because Father Christmas is such a big deal. This is one of the first times you can think of Father Christmas as a normal guy. Yes, and I like it when there isn’t a happy ending! I like it when things end and they are just kind of okay—Father Christmas has this incredible adventure, yet, when he gets home he is just relieved. He’d had an alright time, but not great. I try not to set out to make a funny book. Trying to be funny is never funny. EB White, the author of Charlotte’s Web , had some brilliant advice, he said, “talking about humour is like dissecting a frog: the process is horrible and at the end the frog has died!” So I try not to kill too many frogs while I’m making a book."