Titile of Book: Zoé the Fairy’s Dis­cov­er­ies–A Vis­it to Mara­cas Beach

Au­thor’s Name: Liseanne Mar­tin-Subero

Pub­lish­er: Phix­ate Stu­dios (2021)

Quite by serendip­i­ty, I dis­cov­ered “Zoé the fairy’s Dis­cov­er­ies–A Vis­it to Mara­cas Beach” writ­ten and il­lus­trat­ed by Liseanne Mar­tin-Subero of Co­coyea, San Fer­nan­do, At the Mo­hammed’s book store, Gulf View branch, a few days shy be­fore Christ­mas.

Reynold Bassant

This handy pic­ture book is suit­able for all preschool­ers and packs a bang; notwith­stand­ing its tidy size of 20 odd pages. It’s a must read for our ed­u­ca­tors, child psy­chol­o­gists, teach­ers, de­ci­sion mak­ers, li­brar­i­ans and would be short-film mak­ers. And why not for a spe­cial cat­e­go­ry of our Orig­i­nal Caribbean Book Fest Com­pe­ti­tion?

It’s a fine ad­di­tion to our lit­er­ary her­itage and de­serv­ing of its pic­ture book space in any home or pub­lic li­brary shelf. But what’s this shout about a “pic­ture book”? Sim­ply put, it’s a book that is pro­fuse­ly il­lus­trat­ed in which words and the il­lus­tra­tions com­ple­ment each oth­er–con­tribut­ing to the sto­ry’s mean­ing. If a pic­ture book has few or no pic­tures, the sto­ry would be di­min­ished and con­fus­ing. In “Zoé” the sto­ry un­folds in on­ly 20 odd pages. The con­ven­tion­al length for pic­ture books is at least 32 pages, but there is no penal­ty for a short­er pic­ture book.

ZOE THE FAIRY'S DISCOVERIES-A TRIP TO MARACAS BEACH

“Zoé the fairy’s Dis­cov­er­ies–A Vis­it to Mara­cas Beach, fea­tures a gap-toothed fairy with a wry smile—about to go on a day trip to Mara­cas Beach—all by her­self. You see, she’s self-suf­fi­cient and she looks a good three to four years old! But, as we know, a fairy has su­per pow­ers—and can make their own de­ci­sions. So, Zoé de­cides to go to the beach and she takes off by sim­ply flap­ping her wings and zooms up­wards in­to the sky. No, she does not rel­ish join­ing a snaking, snarling dri­ve to the mara­cas beach. She flies her­self there—whoosh—and she’s away.

I like this pic­ture book for its flour­ish of ac­tions, pic­tures and rep­e­ti­tions. It’s a sto­ry about a young per­son, Zoé, and chil­dren would eas­i­ly iden­ti­fy with her as in­trigu­ing and the young ones would want to hear it over and over again. So, par­ents should not put the pot of black eye peas to burst on the stove; turn it off be­fore you be­gin the read­ing ses­sion. Zoé’s a pock­et rock­et of an ad­ven­tur­er and she ex­pe­ri­ences so much on this out­doors trip. She learns about con­cepts such as see­ing, feel­ing, touch­ing, smelling and tast­ing. When Zoé steals a taste of bake and shark from the ven­dor, rest as­sured your au­di­ence will shout for her: “High fives!”

The sto­ry­line is pret­ty lin­ear and the young ones will fol­low their hero­ine from start to fin­ish. For sure, some adults would pre­fer to leave the COVID couch and ven­ture out for the cool­ing co­conut wa­ter; tang of the salty breeze, and not to men­tion—the de­li­cious bake and shark. If you can’t, then I rec­om­mend you buy this book—So set­tle in, share it with your child’s friends who’ll come over; They’ll be wide-eyed, ea­ger and wist­ful as you read the sto­ry over and over.

As for our BLM friends…please note that this book was the in­spi­ra­tion of one of us. Not a foist­ing up­on us by the out­siders. That said, I was hap­py to have read Grimm’s, Hans Chris­t­ian An­der­sen and Ae­sop’s Fa­bles; we all cut our teeth on them. So, let’s write more of our sto­ries!