Children’s Laureate Quentin Blake and best-selling author Russell Hoban have created an entrancing magical and lyrical fantasy that’s perfect for anyone who can share the dream of a magical adventure. A discarded lolly stick dreams of being something BIG…Luckily, it is picked up by Rosie, a little girl who already has a whole collection of lolly sticks. Soon she and all the lolly sticks are off on a rollicking adventure with the important task of raising money for her family. A delightfully quirky story that allows imaginations soar.
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 beautiful edition is jacketed.
This is a story that could only have come from the imagination of Russell Hoban! Brought vividly to life by picture book great, 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 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 and her dreams 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 its 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...Inventive and original, this is a gem from the upside-down imaginative landscape of Russell Hoban.
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.
