As master of suggestion — so the jury in its unanimous decision — Hare succeeds to tell a tender, hopeful story about the future of a mankind that affects and changes the dialog partners without words.
The Pied Piper literary prize is endowed with 5, Euro. Since , the prize is awarded every two years by the city of Hameln for outstanding books of fairy tales and legends, fantastic tales, modern arty fairy tales or stories from the Middle Ages for the target group children and young people. Totally books, which were published between 1 st of January and 31 st of December , have been submitted for the prize. Without any words Hare evokes a wondrous world of black and grey with bright dashes of color — and tells the story of a moon landing of another kind: We live in an unspecified future where the technology enables us to just hop on the moon.
The book cover shows a group of relaxedly chatting children, who, packed in spacesuits and having their helmets clasped under the arm, just enter the spaceship through a Plexiglas pipe. But, what does that mean spaceship: With its round forms and the warm yellow color it looks like a mixture of school bus and Yellow Submarine.
On the moon everything is grey — an enchantingly strange desert or snow landscape invites the school class to jump over ditches and climb craters. It seems that mankind learned in the meantime, because instead of colonizing the mood, everything is cleaned up after the school trip.
This is hardly surprising when looking at the double page where John Hare lets rise the earth on a deep black sky. The child, that all the time had dawdled rather dreamy behind the group, has with it a sketch block and wax crayons.
