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

(Portuguese edition)

An unexpected book with two stories developing in opposite directions: one way, a firefly is looking for a small light; the other way, a rabbit is on the run. Optical acrobatics for attentive and active readers.

This isn’t the first time that Bernardo Carvalho has explored the idea of two stories sharing the same space. It happened in The Two Roads (winner of the CJ Picture Book Festival of Korea), where two routes – each represented by a different colour – run together in opposite directions. There, we had a text and the reader was invited to turn the book over and around in order to discover the story on the other side. In this new book, the challenge is different and sees the author himself attempting to juggle…

In Excuse me, have you seen a tiny light blinking? and Run, rabbit, run! two different stories are told in parallel. The first reads from left to right (as usual) and the second from right to left (less usual). And that’s just where the backflip occurs: by simply reversing the reading direction, the same pictures trace two different storylines.

Confusing? It’s simple, really: on one side we follow the adventure of a firefly looking for a small light, on the other, a running rabbit. Each story takes place against the same backdrop, and the reader has only to follow each character on their adventure, finding their way through the woods or in the city …
But … What if the poor reader gets lost?

Then they must do what all readers do, with all books, everywhere: move through the book, forwards and backwards, looking for connections and meanings between the elements on the page: decipher, read, fill in what’s missing … having great fun along the way.