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Revision as of 08:49, 11 May 2018
, 08:49, 11 May 2018no edit summary
Ottoline Brown lives in the Pepperpot Building in the Big City with her friend, a small, very shaggy creature rescued from a Norwegian bog called Mr Munroe. Her parents are away, travelling and gathering objects to include in the family collections (which include Odd Shoes, Parrot Clocks, Portable Fishbowls and Emperors' Hats). Ottoline looks after the collections while being looked after by a host of service companies like The Home Cooked Meal Co. and Smith & Smith Pillow Plumping and Curtain Drawing Technicians. She is a very clever and inquisitive girl, with a diploma from the Who-R-U Academy of Disguise and is very interested in what's going on around her: from neighbour' conversations she listens to via the heating pipes in the laundry basement to less commonplace mysteries - and it's her who solves the mysterious series of high-society crimes baffling the police: lapdog disappearances followed by daring burglaries.
Chris Riddell is an illustrator and a cartoonist (he works for ''The Observer'' amongst others) as well as the creator of ''The Edge Chronicles'' and the graphic side of ''Ottoline and The Yellow Cat'' is outstanding. The book is beautifully produced, with gold embossing on the red-dominated cover, semi-gloss, quality paper, carefully chosen, sophisticated type, a Royal Postcard Collection add-on in the back, and of course the illustrations themselves, black and white pen drawings using an occasional splash of red for emphasis. I loved the illustrations: quirky would be the word to apply if it wasn't so clichéd, with fantastic detail, spot-on characterisation and plenty of exploration text embedded in the pictures, used as captions and in speech bubbles . The Big City of Ottoline's is very reminiscent of Sendak's night city from [[''In the Night Kitchen]] '' - or so thought my daughter aged 5, although the style is definitely Riddell's own.
The spirit of the story and the whole book is firmly in the tradition of the absurd. Several Polish books were brought to my mind when I read ''Ottoline and The Yellow Cat'' while I couldn't exactly find an English language analogy. There are hints of Gorey, even Dahl (but without the darkness) and [[Harriet the Spy]], even, somehow, ''The Rose and the Ring'' but with a good dose of a surreal humour.
