This wordless board book is well-suited to a story time session for children aged 4-7 years old. This gentle, friendly, and warmly illustrated title is a good way to introduce themes such as peaceful conflict resolution and borders to a junior audience. A set of animals slowly pull down a grey wall and turn the bricks into a bridge instead. This simple premise has a large potential for classroom discussion, providing a cue for young readers to consider what will occur once the bridge has been built, and why the wall was there. Walls and bridges are contentious and important symbols for children to discover as they develop their cultural literacy; this work provides an opportunity to assemble this knowledge through an allegorical and cosy depiction. The carefree representation of a subtly profound and contentious set of imagery provides an optimum way to extend the more difficult themes of European identity to the youngest participants of the project.
This work contains pigs and dogs as characters. Two works in the corpus that addresses the symbolism of walls for older readers are The Illustrated City [Kuvitettu kaupunki] and Fences [Ploty].
