ABSTRACT
With her usual flair, Doonan gives a telling description of Browne’s prize-winning book. The dramatic cover features black and white, vertical, wavy lines which most children interpret as reference to a zebra which is, in fact, missing from the list of animals encountered in the book. ‘Well, it’s just like a zebra, the stripes of a zebra I think and … that’s kind of symbolising a zoo really’ (Joe 10). It is also suggestive of the sort of puzzling optical illusions so favoured by artists like Escher. It could be a postmodernist joke, as Zoo is an unstable text with surrealistic fantasies side by side with hyper-real illustrations. Instead of zebra stripes, those lines could represent the bars of cages dissolving before our eyes. Nothing is what it seems. From the cover in, it is clear this is not going to be a conventional family outing (although that is more or less what it is in the written text) and the reader will be taken on a confusing but rewarding journey.
