Chinese / People's Republic of China
Xia tian
(The summer)
Cao, Wenxuan
(text)
Yu, Rong
(illus.)
Nanchang: Er shi yi shi ji chu ban she (21st Century Publishing Group), 2015. – 38 p.
ISBN 978-7-5568-1158-8
Picture book | Shadow | Summer | Heat | Animal story | Sharing
Reading age: 5+
White Ravens issue: 2016
A mixed group of wild animals in a barren land, eager to seek shelter from the burning sun, fall into a fierce fight after they spot a tree. It is the biggest and strongest of them that finally gets to sit under it. The tree, however, has bare branches and provides the winner with scarcely any shelter. The plot shifts as the animals see a pair of humans, a father and son, go by, the boy walking in the shadow of the man. The cat begins to beckon the rat into his shadow, the dog follows suit with the cat, then the leopard, the bear, and the rhinoceros… The page size enlarges as the shadow grows, until finally, all animals stand together under the large shade of a cloud. A thought-provoking story! Multi-award-winning author Cao Wenxuan is the first Chinese writer to win the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2016. This is his second collaboration with Yu Rong, a British-Chinese illustrator who won the Golden Apple at the Bratislava Biennial of Illustration in 2013 for her picture book “Yun duo yi yang de ba ge” (A myna is like a cloud).