Spaghetti hunters

Morag Hood

Book - 2020

Spaghetti Hunters is a brilliantly funny and wonderfully silly picture book, featuring a duck, a tiny horse and quest for spaghetti, from Morag Hood. But what exactly do you bring to a Spaghetti Hunt? A spade, a fishing rod, a jar of peanut butter, cutlery and some binoculars, obviously. Searching far and wide, Tiny Horse catches worms, a ball of string, even a snake - but no spaghetti. Disaster! Until Duck consults a recipe book and armed with flour, eggs and a pasta maker, sets about making his own spaghetti. This infectiously comic story encourages reading and home-cooking, teaching children about where food really comes from.

Saved in:
1 copy ordered
Contents unavailable.
Review by Horn Book Review

Duck is looking for his spaghetti, but as Tiny Horse puts it, "spaghetti is the trickiest of all the pastas." A search ensues, and while the deadpan narration addresses the mission seriously, Duck and Tiny Horse look in all the wrong places (inside a boot, under a rug) and use all the wrong methods (digging, fishing). A recipe book provides a useful clue, pooh-poohed though it is by confident Tiny Horse: "You can't just MAKE spaghetti." Boldly hued illustrations, painted in gouache and digitally colored, range from vignettes and sequential panels to full-bleed spreads, with absurdity taking center stage. Why is Tiny Horse tiny while Duck is just the right size to live in a teapot? Doesn't matter. The silliness offers young readers and listeners plenty of opportunities to figure things out before the characters do (if your spaghetti is hissing, it might be snakes) -- and that's a heady-spaghetti feeling. Shoshana FlaxJuly/August 2024 p.99 (c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.