Dickimaw Books Blog

A Little Duck with a Hat 🔗

[Originally posted on Goodreads 2016-06-16 at the start of a giveaway of five signed copies of Quack, Quack, Quack. Give My Hat Back! this post describes the book and explains how the story came about. That giveaway has closed, but there is currently a Dickimaw Books giveaway of two signed copies this book that ends 2019-11-01.]

Little Duck lives on the side of the Amazon, and he likes to row his wooden dinghy on the river and loves his big, black top hat, but one day the naughty wind snatches the hat from the duck’s head and makes off with it. The duck chases after it and, one by one, meets up with his various friends who are out on the river, and they join in the chase. In the end, the duck gets his hat back, and they all celebrate with some ice cream. There’s a fair bit of repetition as each new character joins in the chase. The book is a saddle-stitch paperback. At the beginning, there’s an illustrated list of the major characters with a brief bit of information about them, which can be skipped. The last page of the book, after the end of the story, contains the names and images of some of the animals that appeared in the background (sunbittern, cormorant, seriema, giant river otter, cock-of-the-rock, frigatebird,¹ and heron). Within the actual story part of the book, the text is arranged at the top of each page, and a wide landscape image spans the double-page spread below. The book is intended as a ‘read it to small child(ren)’ story not a ‘learn to read’ book.

Now I ought to warn you at this point that a few of the words in the story contain more than two syllables. A teacher once criticised me on this. She said that small children don’t understand words like ‘yacht’ and ‘catamaran’. Personally, I think that children are intelligent enough to work it out by looking at the picture, especially if the adult reader could helpfully point to it. However, I realise that not everyone shares this view, so if you feel that children should only hear monosyllabic words, then this book isn’t for you. The full list of characters involved in the hat chase are: the duck (rowing a dinghy), the arara parrot (in a catamaran), the sloth (sailing a yacht), the caiman (punting a lily pad) and the capybara (paddling a coracle). At one point a school of piranhas try to eat the hat. The river dolphin rescues the hat.

Although I’m English, my mother was born in Brazil. Her father was English and her mother Belgian. It’s rather a long story involving shipwreck (on her paternal grandfather’s side) and war, occupation and supporting the Belgian resistance (on her mother’s family’s side). My grandfather decided to move back to England after he retired in 1963 to be near his widowed sister and also for health reasons (he had developed skin cancer). This turned out quite fortunate for me as otherwise my mother wouldn’t have met my father, and then I wouldn’t be here to tell you about my books. I still have family in Brazil (and Belgium and various other parts of the world), and in 1991 I went with one of my brothers to visit some of them. We took a long-winded route when travelling from one set of family to another and ended up in Manaus by the Amazon. The river (especially at that point) is much wider than Magdalene’s illustrations and she added far more colour to vegetation than actually appears there, but such artistic licence makes the pictures more interesting to small children. (Besides, realism is hardly a top priority in a story with anthropomorphic animals who aren’t viewing some of their friends as a tasty snack.) In addition to all my various relatives, I also have a friend, Paulo Cereda, who lives in Brazil. He likes ducks, and we both like hats. He also has a software tool called arara, which is the Brazilian name for a macaw parrot, and I’m on the development team. One day we were chatting about ducks and hats, and he produced an image of a yellow duck wearing a top hat. It sparked an idea in my head that eventually became ‘Quack, Quack, Quack. Give My Hat Back!’ He very kindly gave me a duck hand puppet, and he also gave Magdalene a macaw hand puppet, so we have some props when doing book readings.

There’s an audio extract from the start of the story (although I’m sorry there’s currently no audio version of the book).

¹It’s labelled ‘Frigatebird’ but it’s more specifically a ‘Magnificent Frigatebird’. The ‘Magnificent’ part was dropped because the page was getting a little cluttered.