Max’ Travel – David Gauthier & Marie Caudry

Max’ Travel, originally published in France under the title “La balade de Max”, is a big story -big because of the size and of the contents- of a boy who is dreaming about going away and find Spring instead of the cold Winter that is about to arrive. 

With his strange cap he starts a travel where only illustrations speaks to the reader. Except for the diary at the very beginning of the book, to pages and few words whereMax told us that he wants to go away, there isn’t text. Recently I’ve been talking with many people about the power of illustrations and the relation between text and images in children’s books. This is a perfect example of how an image can speak and change your feelings every time you open the book and travel through its pages.

There are many details that drive the reader (I repeat, the reader) to find many little things, objects, animals. The book drives to be curious, to follow Max through these places, into a world that is both a dream and has the force of the real things of everyday.

Max and his house finally fly away thanks to the cloud, a cloud that needs a patch. 

As usual books are telling me things. And right now, reading this pages, I think: sometimes our dreams need a large and difficult travel to become true. And sometimes also our dreams break down and we need to fix it, and to re-find the illusion to go on. And then, we’ll be able to fly and see our world from another point of view, and we start a new travel. 

I know that this book had been published in five languages. In Spain Crüilla published it in Spanish and Catalan, but the original publisher in France is Albin-Michel Jeunesse. For the moment I didn’t find other editions of this book on Amazon but if they exist, please tell me!