By Karen Lise Søndergaard. Translated by John Mason.

In recent years Søren Jessen has distinguished himself in the Danish market as an important author and illustrator of books for children and young people. He has an eye for the offbeat and unusual and he manages to portray it with a particular run-of-the-mill quality that makes the difficult accessible. The same quality is evidenced in his illustrations of texts, his own and others’ alike. Weird, distorted figures and a characteristic visual language that uses powerful brushstrokes and expressive colour create room for the element of magic in what is otherwise the ordinary and recognisable world of the child.
    
The borderline between fantasy and reality is also challenged in the picture book Gaven ('The Gift'). Here Frode’s father comes home one day with a huge cardboard box for Frode. Inside is a brand-new TV, and, while his father fiddles around with plugs and wires, Frode crawls into the cardboard box. When his father closes the door behind him, something very strange happens. The box, with Frode inside it, flies out through the window and over the roofs of the town.
    
This signals the start of a wordless journey through a magical universe. From his cardboard box Frode experiences a voyage that begins at the grey end of reality and the spectrum but soon moves towards a golden fantasy world inhabited by card-playing giant hens, flying pigs and pink elephants. Frode is speechless – and the reader captivated. Without using words, Søren Jessen succeeds in creating by means of pictures a meaningful nonsense story in which the mood is intense and constantly shifting. Against a golden evening sky, threatening dark clouds float side by side with winged fried eggs. Christmas trees tower metres high with naked trunks and a star at the top. The green fish has a leg in its mouth, and those tortoises with numbers on them are taking part in a weird race against time. Scattered throughout the book are apparent, acknowledgements to Magritte, Salvador Dali and Lewis Carroll, and this strange fantasy world is at once both enticing and frightening.

Finally Frode ends up back at home in his own room again, just as his father returns to ask what he thinks of his present. The ‘present’ Frode has been given is not the television set at all but the ability to get into a cardboard box and wait for "something weird to happen". The story may be an adult’s tribute to the child’s imagination, but the viewpoint is unwaveringly that of a child, and the picture book lets the readers  borrow Frode’s eyes, allowing them to look and wonder through them.

It is characteristic of Søren Jessen that the fantasy and the fantastic are portrayed as things that are not at odds with reality but a part of it, a way of seeing. When young people’s innermost thoughts and feelings are materialised as body and form, or when a boring cardboard box becomes a fantasy spaceship, it is the experience that is the reality. Søren Jessen challenges his readers always to believe their own eyes.