Maria Nalbantova

As in other books by Valeri Petrov, his prose here also opens up space for beautiful and cheerful poems that create a story within a story. There is a cunning worm that twists like a hook so that the fish won’t eat it, a cat as long as from here to the store, and all sorts of other tricks that Oggy’s grandfather comes up with to put him to sleep faster. The last story is about a grandfather kangaroo who doesn’t put the baby kangaroo in his pouch because it’s full of books, and so it runs all the way to Australia. In the space created by illustrator Maria Nalbantova, we see the house from the outside and the bedroom with the grandfather and Oggy from the inside in one image. The toys from the song about the circus seem to be alive, and at the beginning of the final scene, the bespectacled grandfather kangaroo and a little baby kangaroo are already sitting in the bedroom. The artist uses visual metaphors skillfully – Oggy is sleeping in his bed on the clouds; the sleep button, which can put you to sleep when you turn it clockwise, pierces a tunnel of magical light, which all of the characters from the bedtime story slip into. At the same time, the alternation of close-ups and panoramic compositions with many elements creates a richness and density in the illustrations and helps to divide the book into smaller parts. On entire pages we see a whale, a cat, a funny doll with a two-pointed fool’s cap, all beautifully stylized, and the fine contouring of the large portrait of Oggy in a starry pajamas makes us come to like him very much indeed.