A mouse, full of curiosity, and wanting to be happy, sets off to see the world and meets up with two companions on his adventures, a dog and an elephant, who also want to experience more than everyday things. After travelling through several magic lands and crossing the starry ocean, they come across the Quickeye Cyclops and, in their naivety, they have lunch with him…
Quickeye is a traditional story for pre and early readers, taken from the traditional, popular Mediterranean tale; to be more precise, from two traditions: the adventure story (leaving home and discovering the fantastic and sometimes dangerous outer world) and the Cyclops.
In this story, Elephant and Dog end up in the monster’s belly; but the mouse, with little means and a lot of ingenuity, saves his friends´ lives. In the end, everybody learns: some to be more cautious and others, not to resort to violence; but Quickeye doesn’t only offer a moral, but reason to reflect which pricks the readers’ curiosity and brings about questions, trying to provoke enriching conversations among the children and their mediators (parents, teachers…).
The book literally proposes images, which describe imaginary scenes mixing everyday elements to create a new world, at the same imaginative capacity level of those that conceive blurred overlapping between games and reality; also using parallel and accumulative structures, that help the narrative and memorization.
Maurizio A. C. Quarello shows us once again his dominance of the brush strokes in the illustrations that exude known artistic references, playing with humour and creating a very personal imagery.