Anders and the mountain by Gregory Mackay

It is school holidays and a trip is planned to visit the Alps but before that Anders and friends give a concert to raise funds to buy a weather station for their cubby and their beetles join them for a tour of a lolly factory ‘Alls Welle and Goode'. It seems beetles love lollies and while they are extracting them from the lolly vats the friends meet Dr Larsen, working on a secret project that involves lolly dropping from his plane. When Anders, Bernie, Eden and Whinney wake up and find their beetles gone they are very sad, but it seems there has been a mass migration of insects that night, all flying towards Mt Rumple, the big mountain in the alps where they are going on holiday. The friends draw pictures of their missing beetles, then make clay models of them and then invent a board game with the models as playing pieces until it is time to leave their parents and start their holiday in the mountains with the aunties. As well as enjoying being tourists and playing in the snow, they eventually find the connection between the missing beetles, the lollies and Dr Larsen’s secret project.

Packed with activities, adventures and creativity, the deceptively simple comic style, in soft colours with limited dialogue manages to convey a world where friendship, imagination and teamwork lead to success in the most difficult of circumstances. This is the fourth in the Anders series and to really understand the relationship Anders and friends have with their respective insects it would be best to have read the other stories, a task that will not be arduous.

Themes: Graphic novel, Friendship, Adventure.

Sue Speck