jabukan

The picture book “Quince” tells a fantastic story about four friends who, during the summer holidays, cross the stream near the village where they live, although it’s forbidden. On the other side, however, they find neither “trolls, nor bogeymen, nor tusk-owners, nor dragon’s nests”; they encounter creatures that are almost the same as humans but live in forest dwellings. One of them, the boy Quince (with the word for apple in his name), will make friends with the four children and will reveal to them the secrets of the forests. The author of the text, Lana Momirski, intertwined a number of motives in this framework story: some of the friends will move to a bigger city after the school holidays, and the central heroine will have to learn to deal with parting; playing with Quince, children will learn to respect nature and all its creatures; the forest world will become a kind of refuge, but also a space from which the problems of reality and personal existence can be seen more clearly. Subtle watercolors, by Ivana Koren Madžarac and Lana Momirski, evoke to the young reader all the liveliness, warmth and diversity of this mysterious forest world.