Editorial Review

“You’ve changed over your crockery, your food cupboards – what about your children’s bookshelves? And I am not talking about removing the remnants of squashed bagel, ‘posted’ between them several weeks ago in a moment of toddler experimentation. Well, yes – you need to do that too. But it is also time to add some seasonal reading material. Kar-Ben has two new picture books with a Passover theme.

Jodie’s Passover Adventure, a picture book by Anna Levine (Kar-Ben, £5.99) sees the young would-be archaeologist, equipped with matzah picnic, exploring Hezekiah’s Tunnel, in Jerusalem. The underground passage, mentioned in the Bible, was hand-chiselled before 701 BCE by two teams of diggers, who began from different directions and managed to meet in the middle without the aid of modern instruments.

Ksenia Topaz copes admirably with the challenge of illustrating a book in which half the scenes take place in semi-darkness. What might be lurking in the darkness? A dragon? A dinosaur? Gently scary, to suit ages five to seven.

Izzy the Whiz is an inventor, but one of the most memorable inventions in Yael Memelstein’s Izzy the Whiz and Passover McClean (Kar-Ben, £5.99) is the word ‘bread-ache’ – why have we had to wait so long for a label that sums up the pain of chametz disposal?

Passover McClean is a robot, which carries out the pre-Pesach tidy with such zeal that it consumes the contents of the living room, right to the last chair. In brisk rhyming couplets, the story proceeds, as the robot spits out the contents upside down – and the race is on to put everything right before Mum finishes her nap. Reminiscent of Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat, the story will raise giggles in the undersevens – and perhaps even convince them that helping clear up can be fun.” —The Jewish Chronicle