Stories Aloud
Publication date: 05 Apr 2018
ISBN: 9780857638335
Size: 290 x 230 mm
Length: 32 pages
Picture Books

What’s Next Door?

Quantity

Bursting with imagination, this sequel to the award-winning Open Very Carefully, is full of interactive fun.

Carter, our cross crocodile hero is back, and he’s NOT happy. He’s stuck in another book and all he wants to do is find his way home, but he can’t get there by himself. He needs YOUR help!

In this unique, interactive picture book, with cut-out holes throughout, children are encouraged to take part in the story, to create a door in the page and use their imagination to guide Carter into new worlds, from stormy seas to hot deserts and icy lands. But will that cranky croc and the little friends he’s made along the way ever find their way home?

A hilarious story with cut-out holes throughout that’s great fun for the reader, but bad news for a cross crocodile!

From the winner of the Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize 2014.

Can’t get enough? Discover more inventive and interactive stories from bestselling picture book creator, Nicola O’Byrne. Why not try Bad Cat, Open Very Carefully, The Rabbit, the Dark and the Biscuit Tin, The Last Book Before Bedtime and Use Your Imagination.

Stories Aloud

All of our paperback picture books come with a free Stories Aloud audio reading.

Find out more about Stories Aloud

“A work of pure genius.”

– Father Reading (blog)

“Even for the youngest, intelligent illus­tration offers far more than factual images, reinforcers for the all-important word. Sometimes its absence, in the form of judicious die-cutting, allows for a literal passage between pages, as in Nicola O’Byrne’s What’s Next Door (Nosy Crow), in which Carter, a bilious green crocodile with a bull terrier’s menacing, squat muscularity, is lost. Simultaneously ­begging and belligerent, he holds up a sign: “Please can you help me find my way home? Or I will eat you”. The reader is adjured to draw a door with a finger and think very hard about somewhere wet. On the following page, to ­fanfare (“Well done! That’s a brilliant door!”), a double-doored red portal is revealed to have been cut, through which Carter is ­wiggled to find himself, not at home, but in the sea . . . . This simple formula, repeated with deft variations, inspires complete fascination, imparting the impression that the imagination has the dangerous power of a buzz-saw to bring transgressive, revealing change, as well as furnishing the next page with new perils (from which it alone can provide the escape).”

Times Literary Supplement, reviewed by Imogen Russell Williams

“Carter, the crocodile previously seen in Open Very Carefully, needs readers’ help to get home in this metafictional follow-up. As in the previous book, an unseen narrator directs the action, asking readers to trace dotted lines to create a series of doors for Carter to travel through. The doors, which appear as die-cuts, take Carter to ocean, desert, and snowy landscapes, requiring additional intervention (“Let’s try to get rid of the snow. Can you turn the book upside down and shake the snow out?”) O’Byrne builds light suspense (“I do hope he isn’t going to eat us”) while giving readers an active role in helping Carter make it back to his swampy lagoon.”

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Chinese simplified , Chinese traditional , Danish , Dutch , French , German , Korean , Portuguese EU , Portuguese LA , Russian , Spanish World , Swedish , Turkish , US English

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