A niche for urban romantics

You quickly notice that Serafin, a man in his prime, has not yet found his place in life.

In any case, he is not happy as a seller of subway tickets, and when he is fired for saving a butterfly rather than serving customers, he is not that unhappy after all.

Then a miracle happens: Serafin inherits a house in a large park, which is more of a ruin, but precisely for this reason the starting point for a dream that Serafin, together with his young friend Plum, actively brings to life: a self-built, bizarre, cozy wonder house, in it old and new in the most wonderful mixture, a festival for Serafin and Plum and of course for the readers.

Tilman Spreckelsen

Editor in the features section.

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A picture book classic from 1967 (in the original), a plea for a life that thoroughly defies the pressures of modernity.

And that is precisely why it has not aged at all in the years since.

Just like its two sequels.

Philippe Fix: “Serafin and his miracle machine”;

Diogenes Verlag, Zurich 1970;

32 pp., Hardcover, 18 euros;

from 5 years

Just be careful, witch!

If your own father has been preaching to you for years that you shouldn't go into the forest behind the house, because there is a witch living there, and when this father then willingly runs into the forest to collect blueberries, then you can easily get the idea come that the danger is not far off. In any case, the girl Dulcinea, to whom exactly this happens, actually sets out to look for him in the forest after her father does not come back from the blueberry hunt. The witch, she notes, is not a rumor, but real and as vicious as feared. But the father cannot help her because it has meanwhile been turned into a tree.

The children's book that Ole Könnecke wrote and illustrated is also magical.

Dulcinea will be quickly taken to the heart.

And don't doubt for a second who of the two, witch and Dulcinea, will prevail in the end.

Ole Könnecke: “Dulcinea in the magic forest”, a fairy tale;

Hanser Verlag, Munich 2021;

64 pp., Hardcover, 16 euros;

from 5 years

Follow the seasons with the migratory birds

“Once upon a time there was someone who had nobody and nothing” - this is how the story “One” by Christine Nöstlinger begins. This "one" who has nothing at all has no name either. He doesn't have a home either, so he's at home everywhere. But he finds himself at ease on his wanderings through half of Europe, which, like migratory birds, he aligns with the state of the seasons. He gathers whatever food he can find, sometimes steals a few chicken eggs, bathes in the sea and warms himself in the sun. Then, on the way north, he gets sick. He just manages to get into the house of a "ball-round woman" before he finally collapses. The woman looks after him, she feeds him up. And "one", the nameless man, realizes that his life is slowly changing.

What kind of story is that?

Hasn't it developed a lot of patina since it was first created in the 1970s?

Which child can you get with it today, with this romance between a volatile man and a sedentary woman?

Perhaps it is precisely the interplay of Nöstlinger's text and the groping, playful, colored drawings by Janosch that makes this book so attractive.

Both try something, just like their characters: what it is, such a life with the greatest freedom, how to tell it and how to draw it.

Whether you actually have to pay for it.

And whether the woman's decision to let the snowed-in man go is not also a sign of freedom.