Puffin the Architect (2018)
Kimberly Andrews
Puffin, pb, 32pp
ISBN 978 0 14 377218 7
This award-winning picture book, Puffin the Architect, uses a family of puffins to show the role
architects may play in creating a home that is good to live in. The story –
told in verse – begins as Puffin introduces herself as a designer of a range of
homes ‘from cottages and bungalows to
mountain huts and domes.’
Now she has the tricky task of designing a home for herself and her two
pufflings.
‘My toughest clients ever!’
She shows her offspring some of the homes she has designed. Her clients
include a platypus, a bloodhound, a moose and a giraffe. The goose, a painter,
has a studio with folding furniture and a tunnel for drying art work. Pig has a
mobile tool-shed on wheels with a pulley-operated bed. The otter family home
has a boat with ‘lots of clever cupboards full of fish hooks and life jackets.
Puffin’s problem is that her offspring don’t like the other animals’
homes. Every example, no matter how original, is rejected. The young pufflings explain that they are not
hounds or pigs or moose.
‘Can’t you make a puffin cottage?’
they ask.
As it turns out, Puffin can. Listing everything puffins need – such as
a pulley-operated fish-drying rack – she quickly designs the perfect puffin
home. The concluding page shows the Puffin family in residence, with all their
animal friends enjoying a dinner party in Puffin Cottage.
The text reads well, with simple rhymes and a good rhythm, while the
comments from the pufflings appear in speech balloons.
The pictures are amazing. Each building has its own double page spread
showing a cross-section, with the occupants enjoying their home’s special
features. Each picture has inset a project design sketch (by Puffin Design)
showing a plan of the home or a diagram of a feature.
Even the endpapers are full of amusing details about the (fantasy) home
life of puffins.
This is a book where the pictures and text both reward careful scrutiny
of the details
Trevor Agnew
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