What a hit! First, Tullet drew a face on each of their index fingers. But at a recent author event I got to see Tullet share it with a little girl from the audience. The Finger Circus Game could seem like the tamest in the batch with a different circus act on each spread and two round cut-outs for fingers. In the dark, use your torch and embark on a magical night-time adventure." I can imagine the adult making book shadows (you have to have long arms with the flashlight some distance from the wall) while the child extends the story with hand shadows. The back cover says, "You'll need a grown-up's help to play this game of shadows. The Game of Shadows has text but it doesn't really need any. Where to start? Where to end? Are you an optimist or a pessimist?
But flip from the back of the book and the nighttime setting is dark and spooky, full of menacing animals with white teeth. The Countryside Game (above) actually is wordless, and the copy on the back cover urges back-and-forth exploration of overlapping scenes: "Tell your adventure aloud as you go - just turn the pages to begin!" Turning pages from the front begins the story with bright daytime colors and cheerful people. When he shares them with children, he rarely reads what's on the page, relinquishing control over the narrative and handing his reins to the audience. While Press Here gave explicit instructions to the reader, many of his other books could easily be wordless. He loves to play around with page turns: when to turn the page, how fast, and in which direction. Now I think he's a book-making genius who likes to push the boundaries of the picture book as an art form, manipulating the book as an object as much as he can to take advantage of its kinetic properties. There was a time I would have said these were games masquerading as books, but that was before Press Here - and before I saw Tullet in action and became a disciple. The big question for me is, "Are these books or games?" Each is part of a series, published by Phaidon, with the word "game" in the title: The Game of Let's Go!, The Game of Mix-Up Art, etc. Tullet's books could still be reviewed by The Horn Book Magazine, but so far only two have.
(The Guide doesn't review toy books or board books, even though most of Tullet's books printed on boards are for kids way beyond the chew-on-the-corners stage. You won't see them reviewed in the Magazine or Guide, but we think they are worth noticing, especially for fans of Tullet's 2011 Press Here. We recently pulled these three books by Hervé Tullet out of a box of review copies.
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