Un pelo en la sopa (A Hair in My Soup)

Introduced as an ‘absurd little tale’, A Hair in my Soup is reminiscent of the kind of surreal stories that were more common fifty years ago, when children’s stories were less likely to double up as moral lessons. The text is extremely brief. A little girl complains that there’s a hair in her soup. Her mother says that there’s a fly in her soup, then her father exclaims that there’s a hat in his. The hat lifts up and under it is a little man, who climbs out of the father’s soup bowl with a fishing rod which he uses to extract the fly from the mother’s soup. Then the man climbs back into the father’s soup and disappears, as do the fly and hair. ‘Something extraordinary had happened’ announces the text, with admirable restraint - and that is the end.

This clearly isn’t a book that delivers much of a story but, with its simple line drawings in red and black and its surreal presentation, it may appeal to parents who are tired of saccharine children’s stories with messages and meanings. The drawings are artistic in a distinctively Spanish style (they could even recall simple sketches by Picasso) and this is the kind of book that might be more at home in an art gallery bookshop, such as the Tate, than in Waterstones. A higher price tag might identify it as an ‘arty’ book, but I could also see it working as a small format book. It might well be successful with book-buyers looking for something a bit different, especially as a gift, and one destined to appeal to parents as much as children.

From the reader´s report by Miranda France