Here’s a book that’s got it all: beautiful illustrations, wonderfully inventive text, and pigeons. Or at least I think they’re pigeons. Plumper than pigeons perhaps, and lovelier, but the eyes are quintessential squab. Don’t get me wrong, I love pigeons, just not on my bird feeder. Cybèle Young’s pigeon-like birds, on the other hand, would be welcome at my feeder at any time. Not that they would ever get there of course, at least not before all the seeds had been consumed by the sparrows and nuthatches. Faced with the dilemma of having to get to the other side of the river, ten birds devise ten unique methods of negotiating the gap. It’s not so much a case of why did the chicken (pigeon) cross the road, but how. And I can promise you one thing: these birds think out of the box. Way out out of the box.

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