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Jump to navigationJump to searchMortimer Keene: Ghosts on the Loose by Tim Healey and Chris Mould (view source)
Revision as of 13:26, 23 February 2014
, 13:26, 23 February 2014no edit summary
This snappy verse story is great fun for the target audience. The rhymes are punchy and very easy on the ear, and for the adult reading to the child there must be some relief in the fact that most of the voices she'll have to put on are adult ones, and not a host of child characters. There are several characters, however – this is a busy little plot for very few pages, and is over very quickly in a bright, amenable fashion.
What that does mean, to some extent, is that Mortimer is really on the back seat – he isn't met until a long way through this, and for a title character he's not around much, even with two a prior books for him to become familiar. The book resorts instead to seeing the mayhem he creates, and that's done as expertly as one would expect from the pen of [[:Category:Chris Mould|Chris Mould]], one of the more consistently great illustrators for the young.
But all that effort is really, seriously kiboshed by the book's format and design. Full page spreads are swallowed up in the centre fold, the layout of most of the pages is hampered by losing detail, and I didn't find the black-and-white-and-blue format to the colouring very appealing. The book remains readable – and re-readable, given the quality of the writing. But our artist has been done a great disservice with this production, and by the time the spine has been broken copious times for us to see the complete vision of the artworks, this won't be lasting nearly as long as it should.
