English / New Zealand
Fuzzy doodle
Szymanik, Melinda
(text)
Bixley, Donovan
(illus.)
Auckland: Scholastic New Zealand, 2016. – [32] p.
ISBN 978-1-77543-250-0
Caterpillar | Metamorphosis | Butterfly | Imagination | Writing | Book | Picture book
Reading age: 4+
White Ravens issue: 2017
Fuzzy starts life as a simple scribble but then becomes a quirky caterpillar with a voracious appetite for ink and words. When words cannot satisfy his hunger, he dines on paragraphs, stories, and even illustrations, before entering his chrysalis and emerging transformed. Charcoal and watercolour illustrations especially stand out in this creative picture book, flawlessly combining with the text to show the transformation from Fuzzy the scribbled idea, to the word-eating caterpillar, and finally the beautiful butterfly book. The first pages are black and white, but as Fuzzy eats more creative and colourful meals, swaths of watercolour brighten the pages and Fuzzy himself. Rhyming text parallels a caterpillar’s growth and metamorphosis with the creative process of writing. At first, Fuzzy is only an idea, “a smudgey sort of ‘something’ at the bottom of the page.” But with words, images, time, and a little magic, this idea becomes something greater than how it first began.