I picked up Patrizia Levi‘s 2024 picture book The Flying Circus for one reason: it was new. I had heard nothing about it, and didn’t know Levi’s work.
I will say this: I will definitely look for Levi’s work in the future, and for books illustrated by Laura Barella.
The Flying Circus is a stylish book, one that pays a great deal of attention to layout and design, even down to font choice. The images are gentle and lovely, and interact with the text. (By the first page of the actual story, feathers are spilling onto that page from the next, as if carried by a breeze.)
And the story itself is…rare. Unique. It is magical realism for children: a strange circus comes to town, and engages the audience with visions, each of which is unique to the person seeing it, but some aspects of which are shared. (Animals run the circus, and there’s a quiet pro-nature message throughout.)
Gravity, reality, light, all of these bend and distort with the turn of a page. And the result is lovely. It is a magical book about magic, reading, experience, and wonder.
(This book won a silver medal in the 2022 Key Colours Competition, which is given for picture book concepts/illustrations.)
