Tecka

Tecka, the octopus, is looking for somewhere to swim in the ocean. After a few failed attempts (above the water, at the bottom, and in the middle), Tecka finds a good place near a pink… blob? This turns out to be the place to be, and all the ocean friends gather there to play.

Paolo Opal’s cartoonish character Tecka is super cute; the tiny purple octopus exhibits a range of emotions with its eyes and is just plain adorable. The colours of the illustrations pop with vibrant blue, orange, pink, yellow, and green, and Opal uses bold black outlines. The overall look of the images is simple and often features just Tecka and the element of the ocean environment or character Tecka encounters. This simplicity of the illustrations renders Tecka appropriate for a very young reader audience.

However, this is where the praise for Tecka ends: the storyline and dialogue fall flat for me. Why is the pink blob the best place to be? What exactly is that pink blob anyway? I was waiting for the pink blob to be revealed as the back of some larger sea creature or anything else really. Instead, the book ends, and identification of the pink mass is left unexplained, and thus I feel like an opportunity for a clever reversal is missed. The point of the book is ambiguous: is Tecka looking for somewhere to swim or for friends? Why is it important that everyone swim together when the other creatures seemed happy where they were in the first place?

Parents might use this book as an opportunity for language development: to talk about the images or to teach their children a few words about ocean creatures. Indeed, Tecka is a visual delight, and, if I see others in this series at the library, I might borrow them. But based on the lack of story development in this book, I don’t see myself rushing out to buy all the books in Opal’s “Simply Small” series.