Happy Go Lucky: Awesome Australian Author Arised me Awestrucked!

My friend Gadis brought her 3rd birthday gift from her parents: a fancy illustrated children book entitled "The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery" and one thing i said about this book: Marvelous! The story is about Horace the Elephant inviting his eleven friends to his eleventh birthday party. After played eleven fun games, they headed to banquet hall at eleven, ready to devour Horace's finest cookings. But someone (or something) already eaten the grand feast, and that's when we readers are challenged to find who the food thief was, by careful observations on the illustrations.

The cover looks like FUN! papertigers.org

And that was the surprise! At first, i impressed merely by fine and beautiful illustrations of Horace and his friends, but after reading the texts (which rhymes beautifully) till the end, i am simply stunned. This is what i love: RIDDLES! And i have a bookful of them, waiting to be solved. That's when i realized that the illustrations are not just mere illustrations, they contain codes and clues, come in various ways i did not imagine. There's Morse code bordering a page, there are Musical codes, card codes, and even hieroglyphs! I have to be very sharp-eyed to find these codes. Some of them were hidden in tiny scribbles, disguised as fancy-shaped bush roots, some even can be found only if the book is tilted in the right angle. Finding the codes itself is something, but deciphering them is another, and that's why it's double the fun.

This very detailed pic is full of codes! (gracefuldoe.wordpress.com)

Happily said, my suspicion on one of Horace's friends is right, and in the endmost page, there is another coded message to congratulate me on my correct deduction, plus one last challenge! What a fun!

But in the end i wonder, Gadis got this book when she's 3. I doubt there's any 3 year old Indonesian girl can understand what this all-English book is all about, let alone unravel the book's deepest mystery. But then again, the illustrations themselves is beautiful enough for any 3 year old girl to read, there's just no need to know the meaning of English texts or even the codes if you are a simple-minded 3 year old! :D (hey, if i do not read the story through i would not even know there are codes!)

Nevertheless, i searched the author, Graeme Base, on google. He's Australian, quite a surprising fact while his illustrations contain Persian rugs, Roman costumes, Art Deco-styled rooms, and more. Well, maybe he simply is wonderful :)

From Wiki, i found out that his another children-book Animalia was even more famous. So i googled (whew, "googled" is now a verb) Animalia. This book is intended for children to learn Alphabet, so there are illustrations of Animals whose name started with alphabets A-Z, and objects with the same first-letters. And all the titles of every alphabet is written in witty puns!

For example,