Excuse me, have you seen a tiny light blinking? / Run, rabbit, run!

(Portuguese edition)

This is an unexpected book where two stories go in different directions: on one side, a firefly is looking for a small light; on the other, a rabbit runs madly. It’s a trick of illusionism for attentive and active readers.

This is not the first time that Bernardo Carvalho explores the idea of two stories sharing the same space. It happened in the book The Two Roads (winner of the CJ Picture Book Festival of Korea) where two trips, each represented by a color, overlap in opposite directions. In that case, there was a text and the reader was invited to turn the book around so as to discover the story of the other side, in this new book, the challenge is different and became a sort of a juggling act for the author …

In Excuse me, have you seen a tiny light blinking? followed by Run, rabbit, run! two different stories are told, the first one reads from left to right (as usual) and the second from right to left (less usual). The illusion that we were talking about comes from this: with the same pictures, and only by reversing the reading direction, two distinct storylines appear. Confusing?

It’s simple: on one side we follow the adventure of a firefly looking for a small light, on the other, a running rabbit. Both share the same scenarios, and the reader just has to follow each one of these characters and their adventures, so as to find the way in the woods or in the city …
But … What can the poor reader do if he gets lost?

What all readers do, with all books, everywhere: browse through the book, backwards and forwards, looking for connections and meanings between the elements of the page: decipher, read, build up what’s missing … and have great fun along the way.