StoryCloud: The Hoopoe Bird by Emma King and Ross Collins

Illustration by Ross Collins

 Browsing through the Discover Children's Centre website tonight I happened upon the StoryCloud project, an online interactive library created especially for the London Festival 2012.

Here's the site's description: 

StoryCloud is an online story library featuring twelve brand new exclusive stories from award winning and up-and-coming authors and children. Each story is accompanied by a brilliant illustration. A new story will be released each Monday of the Cultural Olympiad until 3 September. The ninth story is now live, The Hoopoe Bird by Emma King and illustrated by Ross Collins.

The Hoopoe Bird is a simple little tale about a cruel magician and an exotic bird that he holds captive. Caught by the magician after a bold rescue mission during which some half-starved dolls are set free, the Hoopoe is chosen to star in the magician's performance show. But the Hoopoe bird has other ideas, and refuses to sing. What follows is a battle of wills between the man and bird.

It's a short and to-the-point tale with few major twist or turns and a strong overall moral. But what really sets this story about is its method of telling.

The story comes to life in the mouths of the fantastic child narrators on the available audio track. They bring warmth and depth to the tale with their tone and timing, and humour through the emphasis on words like 'dark' in the opening line, 'there was once a evil magician who did dark magic.' Whilst the style and tone of their delivery mimics traditional storytelling, the simplicity of the story kept the experience fresh.

I say they because I found it difficult to tell how many different voices I was hearing. There's something automated about the audio production that echoes the text-to-speech Kindle voice, and it certainly sounds like the recording has been heavily edited.

But there was still something about the actual process of being read to that really captivated me. It reminded me of Dr Jane Davis' essay 'The Reading Revolution' in the Stop What You're Going and Read This Vintage collection, where she describes The Reader Organisation's Get Into Reading programme as a 'read-aloud' group. In this essay, Davis describes how magical the process of reading literature aloud can be. She recalls being unexpectedly handed an emotive poem to read in a meeting, 'John had handed me some sad powerful magic, and I'd set it off by reading it aloud, a sort of spell.' It's a beautiful way of pointing out what we lose when we stop being read to as children. 

The Get Into Reading read-aloud groups are primarily focused on bringing the restorative aspect of communal reading to children, the elderly, youth groups, office workers, the mentally ill and many more. (You can find out more here: http://thereader.org.uk/get-into-reading/)