Kevin Waldron, Harold’s Hungry Eyes, Phaidon/Penguin Australia, 15 March 2016, 32 pp., $22.95 (hbk), ISBN: 9780714871240
Food obsessed Harold the Boston Terrier (he looks very like a French Bulldog) imagines food in the most unlikely places (the traffic lights are ice cream cones, the lampshade is a cake, the bicycle has pretzel wheels). One day his favourite chair gets thrown away and he follows the rubbish truck only to get lost in the big city of New York. Scared and hungry, he follows his rumbling tummy past familiar food-like landmarks to find his way home where a surprise awaits.
Harold is an incredibly cute and appealing character with a very relatable foible (he loves his food) and problems (his favourite non-food thing is missing, he gets lost). This a delightfully told story where the text and illustrations perfectly complement each other. The language is rich right from the start (‘Harold was hungry. Harold was insatiably hungry.’) The reader is drawn into Harold’s sense of loss, sadness and fear by shifting perspectives – he is dwarfed by imposing buildings and lost in a jumble of people and dogs. The story is pictorially conveyed through simple bold blocks of colour and line sketches sparingly overlaid with collage. Combined with the use of matt paper, the feel is retro.
Children will delight in Waldron’s quirky use of mixed media with photos of food set into a sketched city landscape, and will be inspired to imagine shapes in their everyday lives. They will love the adventure of Harold losing an object of great importance and his quest to find it. But they will especially laugh at food-obsessed Harold’s quirky way of finding his way home, and they may even find themselves, like Harold, insatiably hungry.
Harold’s adventure us set in a recognisably New York streetscape with yellow school buses and rows of big apartment blocks, fire hydrants and the Manhattan Bridge in the background (the author lives in New York).
Parents will enjoy sharing this story as much as their children – for 4-8 years. Highly recommended.
Reviewed by Debra Tidball