Tiny

The endpapers offer a dark night, with the planets and moon sailing by. At the bottom of the page, there is Something Hairy, with a tiny white insecty Thing lodged among the furry undergrowth - a spider, maybe? On the title page, we see the Thing in gruesome close-up - it has a curious pink proboscis, a toothy grin, and a battered Sam Weller hat at a rakish angle. The next opening reveals all. The Thing is wearing four blue pointy boots which might be some kind of limited edition from Doc. Martens. In very large and irregular lettering, the story begins, 'Once upon a time there was a flea called Tiny'. From then on, through the remaining eleven double page openings, Rogers and Paul play the kind of game children love. It's like the one where you write your name and address in the front of a book and keep on going through to The World, The Galaxy, The Universe ... and probably nowadays into Cyberspace and beyond. Here, the 'camera' draws back, and back, and back from the body of Tiny's host, the Something Hairy of the endpapers, a cartoon mongrel called Cleopatra. We zoom out to an aerial view of Cleopatra's house, to the neighbourhood, the town, the island, the planet, and right out into the solar system. There's a neat twist and a good joke in the ending and, heaven help us, someone might want to argue that it's educational too. Paul's illustrations, as always, have enormous energy and wit in their spiky, wacky fashion and there is also the comforting, and highly relevant notion for very young readers, that 'Perhaps it doesn't matter that I'm so small after all'.