seawoodwrites 's review for:

The Moomins and the Great Flood by Tove Jansson

4.0

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I picked this up after reading Rihanna Pratchett's lovely article in The Guardian on the third anniversary of her father Terry's death. I hadn't actually read any Moomins when I was little, I just remember the really odd Polish cartoons that were on ITV for a while. This is a sweet story, searching for Moominpappa and collecting a number of odd characters along the way. Unlike modern children's books, though, some of those odd characters are "insignificant" to the plot - they arrive, travel for a while, then move on out of the story on their own quests with no expectation of meeting again. I find that fascinating; perhaps a relic of a time when travel and communication was nowhere near as easy as now. In today's books, all characters seem to be Chekov's guns - they are all significant somewhere in the story. I think I will look for more of these beautiful editions even though my own children are moving out of the age range now - we all need a bit of innocent weirdness from time to time.