Pinfold’s debut, The Django (2010), featured striking artwork, but lacked direction. His sophomore effort succeeds where the earlier work stumbled. Small Hope, the youngest member of her family, ventures outdoors one snowy morning to confront a monstrous black dog that’s been terrifying her parents and siblings. In a striking spread, Pinfold paints a tiny Small Hope gazing up at a dog the size of Mount Rushmore, its black snout looming malevolently. “Golly, you ARE big!” she says, unafraid. “What are you doing here, you guffin?” She takes off across the snowy ground with a rhyming taunt: “You can’t follow where I go,/ unless you shrink, or don’t you know?” The dog pursues Small Hope from spread to spread, shrinking as he goes, and the pair arrives home to find the rest of the family comically armed for battle with kitchen utensils. Pinfold’s interiors are crammed with quirky detail, and his small sepia vignettes, which cluster around the story’s text, are an elegant detail. More crucially, the story stays focused, the pacing is strong, and Small Hope is as charming as she is brave. Ages 4–7. (Oct.)
Pinfold’s story has a timeless quality despite its entirely original flair, with sumptuous paintings and thumbnail embellishments adding narrative and descriptive content... A great pick for storytime, bedtime, anytime.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
An ode to scale, to the portholes and bay windows of Victorian architecture, the poetry of family chatter, and steampunk elegance of antique hot-water heaters, all are here for young eyes to luxuriate in and imagine that they are courageous Small with their family’s love shining down like rainbows. Fear, fun, and just dripping with beauty, this title will pair perfectly with Neil Gaiman’s The Wolves in the Walls.
—School Library Journal (starred review)
Pinfold’s lavish, Van Allsburg-like illustrations, which juxtapose tiny black-and-white sketches with big, detailed, frozen-in-time paintings, are quirky, funny, and often heart- stopping. Part David and Goliath, part Gingerbread Man, this UK import is a shot of courage for those who need it most.
—Booklist (starred review)
Pinfold’s interiors are crammed with quirky detail, and his small sepia vignettes, which cluster around the story’s text, are an elegant detail. More crucially, the story stays focused, the pacing is strong, and Small Hope is as charming as she is brave.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The traditional feel of the cumulative telling and the art’s surreal precision and fanciful decay combine to offer a curious metaphorical consideration of what it means to be afraid and what it takes to conquer those fears.
—The Horn Book
Although a charming story on its own, the rich illustrations add more detail and make the story come alive. Readers will enjoy the message that you don’t have to be big to be courageous.
—Library Media Connection
The Australian author-illustrator Levi Pinfold alternates full-page, full-color paintings with smaller, sepia-toned panels. These last recall those of Chris Van Allsburg but have a style all their own. Children and adults will relish the details of Pinfold’s very fine paintings, set in a magical never-time of old typewriters and wood-burning stoves and hand-painted furniture, in which people wear assorted kitchen equipment as hats on their heads.
—New York Times online
This book evokes one of those classical renderings of THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS- so cozy are the interiors.
—The Huffington Post
With a clever story and lovely, expressive illustrations, Levi Pinfold explores the idea that fear can often lead us to do think and do foolish things.
—Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
Gr 1–6—This tale of fear grown wild will ignite the imaginations of many children. Like a thriller, it starts with a threat: a big black dog is outside. As each family member awakens and notices it, it grows as big as a Jeffy. (Look for clues of that beast in drawings strewn about the house.) Structured with outstandingly toned tempera paintings on one side, each family member color-coded and carefully wrought sepia vignettes interspersed with text reminiscent of the work of Shaun Tan on the other, the action advances quickly into a chase. Small, the youngest of the artistic family living in a vertical-gabled red house in an eerily green snow-covered forest, sees the dog for what it is-she calls the MacGuffin a guffin-but agrees he is BIG. She could fit in one of its nostrils! Small makes him catch her if he can. She taunts him down a size and makes him squeeze into a slide, under a footbridge. The visuals go cinemascope during the chase, but resume their structure when they enter the cat flap. An ode to scale, to the portholes and bay windows of Victorian architecture, the poetry of family chatter, and steampunk elegance of antique hot-water heaters, all are here for young eyes to luxuriate in and imagine that they are courageous Small with their family's love shining down like rainbows. Fear, fun, and just dripping with beauty, this title will pair perfectly with Neil Gaiman's The Wolves in the Walls (HarperCollins, 2003).—Sara Lissa Paulson, American Sign Language and English Lower School, New York City
Pinfold's story has a timeless quality despite its entirely original flair, with sumptuous paintings and thumbnail embellishments adding narrative and descriptive content. One by one, the Hope family spies a black dog outside their home, each person describing it as larger and more fearsome than the next. They all proceed to hide from the dog, until "the youngest member of the Hope family, called Small (for short)," steps outside to confront it herself. While her family cowers inside, Small bravely approaches the shaggy beast, who appears quite large indeed in the tempera paintings. A sense of folkloric magic underscores the confrontation as this youngest of three siblings cajoles the dog to follow her on a journey through the woods, under a bridge, over a frozen pond and through a playground. All along, she entreats it to shrink in size, and it does, until it is small enough to fit through a doggy door back at her house. Once they are inside, Small's family welcomes the dog and praises her bravery. "There was nothing to be scared of," she succinctly replies. The closing scene showing Small and the dog cozy by the fire, alongside a thumbnail portrait of the family by the text, leaves readers with a satisfying image of familial contentment. A great pick for storytime, bedtime, anytime. (Picture book. 3-7)
