Beneath another Sun and Star

Af : Lone Ravn

Together with his wife Annette, Bjarne Reuter has written a new book for 5-10-year-olds. Fie skrev brev til Feo (Fie wrote To Feo), is a new story in rhyming couplets, quite sophisticated, but never difficult or abstruse.

Sofie would a letter send
To Feo in some place afar
Another land was Feo's home
beneath a different sun and star

So Fie took her box of paints
and then a piece of paper new
A rainy day she painted there
The rain it rained, the wind it blew.

Fie wants to enclose a lovely ring with a heart on it in the envelope to Feo, but at that very moment the cat jumps up, grabs it and is off like a flash. We follow the ring all round the world with the rat king Ejner, the raven Rex, the skipper, and the swordfish that swallows anything it comes across but most of all loves Cuban meatballs. The ring reaches Feo, who finds it in her dinner:

A finger ring in fish and chips
no one had heard such thing before
Although it came from waters deep
God's Heaven had sent it to this shore

So Feo sends the ring to her best friend, Fie in Denmark, and the story can be rounded off.

And now it's Christmas time once more
with all its candies lit anew,
and Fie whispers to her mum
I'm sure that miracles come true.


Lilian Brøgger illustrates the text with happy, colourful drawings: two lanky, crazy, likeable girls living each on her own side of the world, each her own colour. An unusually good and well‑thought‑out book in which text and illustration combine to form an elegant whole.

This article was published in Danish Children’s Literature no 15