Today the fabulous Blaze and the Castle Cake for Bertha Daye is out and about in the world! Waking up one morning, Blaze and his oodles of chicklet friends discover that their BFF, Bertha Daye, is about to celebrate another year around the sun. What is there to do but make a towering, cavernous castle cake to hold the revelers streaming in from near and far? Straight away the gang bursts into jubilant action, digging in the chocolate mines, hiking up to sugar-dusted mountain peaks, and blixing the batter with gusto. Claude Ponti delivers another captivating jewel of a picture book (a gracefully sizable jewel, at 15 inches high) that Publishers Weekly called “a mash-up of Minions, Miyazaki, and Where’s Waldo?” in their starred review. Alyson Waters & Margot Kerlidou have translated Blaze and the Castle Cake for Bertha Daye from the French. You can order Blaze from our site now, along with Claude Ponti’s earlier masterpieces, My Valley and Hīznobyūtī.
How did the idea of drawing chicks come to you?
Claude Ponti: All you need to do is observe a nursery or a daycare, with twenty kids aged twelve or sixteen months going about their business on the rug, sitting, lying, tummy-timing, crawling, hopping, teetering, falling on their bottoms, sleeping, worming, reptiling, aroma-producing, jam-wearing, stain-covered, nose-running, drooling, kissing, push-shoving, cheerful, pouty, grouchy, sticking their fingers any which where, tasting any which thing, regurgitating, chatty Cathy-ing, daydreaming, and tantrum-throwing, to understand why I started drawing chicks.
(translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud)
