There’s a wild, free-spirited energy running through this month’s picture books, one perhaps best encapsulated in Sara Ogilvie’s cover for The Zebra’s Great Escape by Katherine Rundell (Bloomsbury). A girl astride a zebra makes chase through the fields, her pigtails thrown back by the breeze, a squirrel hitched to her skirt, while a fang-toothed dog tries to keep up with the frenzied gallop. This unlikely quartet star in Rundell’s triumphant move into picture books. Having already wowed older readers with prize-winning middle-grade novels such as Rooftoppers, as well as adult nonfiction, here Rundell’s playful style is paired with the bright, bustling drawings of Ogilvie (who brought Julia Donaldson’s The Detective Dog so lovingly to life) to tell an intoxicating adventure.
“Mink did not believe in bedtimes,” we’re immediately told about the pigtailed girl. While evading sleep one evening, she finds herself accidentally knocked off a swing by a baby zebra who, by muzzling her on the head with his magical snout, somehow gives her the ability to “feel” what animals are saying. The zebra needs help. And so, in scenes reminiscent of the infant Frank hiding a whole zoo from his parents in Stephen Collins’s hilarious Baby’s First Bank Heist, Mink must smuggle the zebra into her bedroom to find out more. “Did you just… neigh?” Dad says as he leans in to say goodnight.
