Of course we know the one with the bird and the fish!
One of them says to the other: "How do you fly with those funny wings?" The problem for Jonny isn't that he doesn't know this joke, that he's just a little slower on the uptake than anyway.
It's that he just doesn't get it when Maggie, the lady beetle he's so strangely attracted to, tells it.
It's Jonny's story: The readers of Dita Zipfel's ravishingly illustrated and designed children's book "Brummps - They called him ant" by Bea Davies got it right at the beginning what Maggie tries to explain to him shortly before the end, a hundred pages later.
Jonny is not an ant, although none other than the Queen Ant herself, Queen Mama, he - "It's one of us!"
Fridtjof Küchemann
Editor in the Feuilleton.
Follow I follow
As an ant, Jonny is quite a loser: Much too fat for the building, he is pushed into a hollow outside, is not suitable for the construction site due to his clumsiness and cannot tell the sisters apart.
The others really don't know what to do with him.
Bosse and the Bossis, rascals in Hill Three, bully him.
Only little Butz, washed over from another burrow herself, stands by him, thinks up almost as many encouraging sayings as she has set up rules for survival, sleeps with him in the hollow at night, during the day in a relaxed supine position snoozes one business after the other for the two and finally risks first her health and then her life for her boyfriend.
But before he can do that, Jonny has to feel the occasional buzzing that can't bode well, even tripping a little ant riding on his back at one point.
Whereupon Jonny wants to go to Doc's sister, the ant with the white coat, for treatment.
Of which, however, Bosse and the Bossis get wind.
Which gives Cheffe the idea of disguising himself as the medicine ant in a very inadequate way.
Which Jonny, however, gullible as he is, falls for it.
Diagnosis: humps.
A "bacterioviralomatic vaccination", highly contagious, against which there is no "Mikidament".
Off to the trough, Jonny, and most importantly, don't talk to anyone about it.
Jonny is impressed enough to try the isolation thing, but not disciplined enough not to spill it to Butz.
So the motto is: just the two of you off into the wilderness, whose large, open mouth lurks behind the hill and devours everything that comes too close.
In a wilderness like this, other people have already found their true self, and Jonny is also taking a few decent steps in this direction, it's getting underground and romantic and dangerous, Jonny gets an idea of where he belongs, but before that he has something to do, a fight, a friendship service, and how it all ends is fortunately not told.
How it goes on will surely be told in the minds of the six or seven-year-old readers, because this story leaves no one cold and hardly anyone lets go of it that quickly.
Where: readers.
Even those who start reading this book with a determination that is not inferior to that of Jonny on the way to the wild will have to struggle with words like “air exchange microperistalsis” or “bacterioviral-alomatic vaccination”.
And anyway, this is a book to read aloud.
The best thing about "Brummps" isn't the weird story, isn't Butz and Jonny and Cheffe, the delightfully cast characters, the slapstick moments and dialogues, isn't the narrator who - "I'm everything here, the whole Forest” – always addresses his audience directly.
It's the sound of the book.
Effortlessly and intoxicatingly, Dita Zipfel changes from poignant to chatty, from atmospheric to breathtakingly fast-paced scenes, she takes it upon herself to explain things about the forest and life itself, and you literally hang on her every word while reading.
Conversely, this means that anyone who wants to read this book would do well to have read it to themselves beforehand.
For all the voices and moods and swerves and curves.
All at once more or less doesn't matter.
There is still a lot to be read.
Promised.
Dita Zipfel, Bea Davies: "Brumps. They called him an ant.”
Hanser Verlag, Munich 2022. 136 pages, hardcover, EUR 15.
From 6 years