National Library of Australia

March 2020

ISBN:   9780642279583

RRP: $24.99

‘Late one night, Felix heard a thousand giants march across the sky and the round, silver moon went into hiding.’

Many children are fearful of storms – especially when they are ferocious. The Kid was one of these and would quite literally turn white and visibly tremble. It took a couple of years to build her up to a point where now she almost enjoys a storm – except for when they are really wild and then she will always sit quite close!

When Felix can’t cope with the tremendous crashing and the horrid dark he decides to put his torch to good use and create a ‘light’ friend. What follows is a cavalcade of strong and brave shadow creatures and all are impatient to play. A little uncertain at first, Felix is soon frolicking with them all, confronting his fears of the night and becoming empowered in his own resilience.

Readers will be truly enthralled with the wonderful traditional shadow shapes and will be uber-excited when they reach the end of the book to find some fabulous information on shadow puppets in general and their cultural importance in Asia. To top that off they will able to create their own shadow puppets with the templates and instructions which conclude the book. Puppetry is a dramatic art which never fails to engage children of all ages (our own Year 9 students have been creating puppet play scripts and using some fabulous ‘muppets’ to perform them). Shadow puppets are possibly one of the simplest to achieve with ready-to-hand materials at home which is a big plus and very handy in these times!

Perhaps readers could create their own scripts which echo the bravery and imagination in Felix’ story and then perform them for family.  Alternatively, they might like to recreate favourite stories using shadow puppets. This would certainly be a very rich learning experience all round.

I would highly recommend this for children from around 6 years upwards and the follow-up for families who are looking for a different activity to reduce a little screen time.

You could even make a theatre for your puppet play…