An enchanting and magical story richly illustrated by former Children’s Laureate Quentin Blake. Rosie collects old ice lolly sticks. Without any lolly left what is the point? Luckily, the sticks themselves work out a reason and form themselves into a wonderful horse. In Quentin Blake’s illustrations the prancing lolly stick horses gallop across cities and jungles and over oceans and deserts on the quest for pirates and their gold.
Quentin Blake's hallmark illustration style breathes energy and mischeviousness into something as small and ordinary as a disused ice-lolly stick. If an ice-lolly stick can be a horse...then YOU can be anything you wish to be!
This is a story that could have come only from the imagination of Russell Hoban, brought vividly to life by the picture-book supremo Quentin Blake. This story begins with an ice-lolly stick. Its sweetness gone, it lies discarded and lonely...until a little girl called Rosie comes along. She places it carefully in her cigar box, full of other sticks. Without our ice-lollies we are nothing, says an old stick. But this new stick wants to BE something and into the minds of all the old sticks he plants dreams...maybe they can be something, too. What about Rosie? That night she dreams of helping her parents pay the bills. And so, at the stroke of midnight, magic and dreams collide and a HORSE gallops out of the cigar box! His name is Stickerino. Where to? he asks Rosie. Anywhere with treasure! she answers and hops on his back. Then begins an adventure like no other...ice-lolly mountains by the sea, caskets of gold, and pirates foiled by a stickling ice-cream van.
Russell Hoban was born in Pennsylvania, USA. His parents were Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine; his father was the advertising manager of a Jewish newspaper as well as a dram guild director. Russell was thus exposed to the arts early on, and became interested in writing at an early age, winning prizes for his stories and poems during his school years.
As an adult
Russell served in the US Infantry during WWII. For a time he taught art in New York and Connecticut. He then worked as a freelance illustrator and an advertising copywriter. He began publishing children's books in 1958, and since then has published more than fifty. His picture book The Sea-Thing Child, illustrated by Patrick Benson, was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal. Russell passed away at the age of 86 in 2011.
