Lyuba Haleva - To Put It Mildly

Svetlyo is a boy with a kind heart who helps animals in trouble: for example, a woodpecker someone threw stones at, a turtle that has turned over on its back, and a mole that someone tried to drown. And when he himself gets into trouble, the animals come to his aid. The boy has committed a small sin: he wrote a letter to his grandmother saying that he did not receive the three levs she sent him. And everyone tries to retrieve the letter, led by the Dog – an amazing mongrel who pretends to be a St. Bernard. Valeri Petrov’s tale has become a Bulgarian children’s classic with the delightful poems embedded in the story, along with cheerful dialogues and vividly depicted characters. Illustrator Lyuba Haleva follows the steps of the story in an extremely poetic and far from literal way. She includes episodes from the story on each page, and she collages fine pencil drawings with details of letters and stamps. In the resizing of the elements relative to each other, small houses and swings alternate, along with enormous leaves, a dog’s paw in a mailbox, and a rebus describing children’s mischief; typographic elements of particular importance in the text are enlarged to the size of the whole page. The artist’s inexhaustible imagination develops the images of the characters in a special spatial system, where the eye looks from above and from the side simultaneously, as they finally return home to finish dreaming. A delightful book.