Any child who has ever been accused of running wild (wrongly or rightly) will be tickled by the spunky little girl in If I Were a Lion, who feels compelled to mount a spirited defence from her time-out chair — and, the whole thing even rhymes!

The vivid watercolour and gouache illustrations here also bring the precocious girl’s vivid (some say wild) imagination to roaring, growling, clawing and splashing life as she gives her own hilariously extreme definitions about what she thinks ‘wild’ entails — surely, surely, NOT the cheeky, wide-eyed cherubic girl herself… right?

Well, let’s just say you’d almost believe her if not for all the contradictory evidence that abound in the house!