-Have you seen the lion? -the frog asked-. I’ve brought him a letter that smells of fresh grass and freshly cut flowers.
This formula, full of lyricism, is repeated to all the animals the frog meets, the album completing page by page a type of puzzle with the creatures in the jungle, whose answers become small clues.
The answers reveal details that will lead the tireless amphibian to discover the lion’s whereabouts at the same time increasing his curiosity and that of the inhabitants of the jungle and the readers’ to discover the motive why the lion only runs and runs; doesn’t hunt nor eat and, above all, his insistence on reaching the moon.
The Venezuelan-Uruguayan writer Armando Quintero has a long and recognized career as an oral narrator. This experience is evident in the narrative tension he has incorporated in Have you seen the lion?, this album being his second collaboration with OQO his first being Snails, the collection for first readers in nanOQOs.
The lion’s strange behaviour has everyone intrigued: to reach the moon seems to be the intention of someone who is mad or a feat of someone in love. Aimed at reflecting their confusion, the illustrator Géraldine Alibeu presents the animals in the jungle in static poses and reduces to the limit the palette of colours. Thus, transmitting the inability of these, the frog included, to explain what is happening to the lion they fear unhinged.