A canine adventure… at the bottom of the sea
by Pedro Panhoca da Silva & Camila Lourenço Panhoca
That’s what Suvaco (“Armpit” in English translation) does in this children’s book. Written by Jana del Favero and illustrated by Gilberto Cunha Jr., Suvaco em um mergulho animal (2022), which means Suvaco in a radical dive, is the second of five books that the author dedicates to her dog Suvaco, a real pet who loves balls and was born deaf.
Suvaco puts on his diving suit and dives into the ocean, guided by a dolphin friend. He meets marine animals such as the seahorse, Jack (a whale shark), the jellyfish, the starfish, the octopus, the pufferfish and the sperm whale. With each animal met, a lesson is learnt: the male seahorse is the one who carries the babies during gestation; the whale shark only feeds on plankton; the tentacle of a jellyfish can hurt; the starfish has the ability to regenerate; the octopus camouflages itself and releases a black ink to confuse its predators; the pufferfish inflates to look bigger and scare its predators; the sperm whale can live in extreme conditions on the ocean floor but needs to surface to breathe from time to time.
Perhaps the main lesson of the text is the moment when Jack asks Suvaco for help to get a jellyfish out of his fin. Suvaco discovers that it was a plastic bag, and the dolphin explains how dangerous it is for marine life to encounter plastic, whether in bags or straws.
This book was part of the “Leitura para todos” (“Reading for All”, in English translation) project sponsored by Aliance Sonae – now ALLOS – the biggest shopping center manager in Brazil, whose mission was to distribute 200,000 children’s books free of charge in communities close to the 38 shopping centers across the country.
Just like the adventurous little dog, many Brazilians (children and adults alike) frequent the seas and rivers, especially during the holiday period, and educating the younger generation through literature can help change our mentality about environmental preservation and sustainability. Sometimes the example comes from the bottom up…
Camila Lourenço Panhoca is a specialist in Early Childhood Education and Literacy from the Claretian University Center (CEUCLAR). She is teacher at Colégio Antares. She has dozens of published book reviews in journals, newspapers and websites. Contact: camiladopedro@gmail.com
Pedro Panhoca da Silva is a PhD in Letters from Mackenzie Presbyterian University (UPM) and tutor at Minas Gerais State University (UEMG)/Barbacena. He is the author of the book Traumas & Tabus (2016), co-editor of the books Narrativas interativas contemporâneas (2022) and Role-Playing Game: práticas, ressignificações e potencialidades (2021), besides hundreds of poems, short tales and short stories published in literary anthologies of Brazil, Portugal, Spain and India. He writes reviews and articles to Alarums and Excursions (monthly) and Legendary Art Magazine (quarterly), proofreads gamebooks to Jambô publishing house as a freelancer and helps to update gameboorks.org. Contact: ppanhoca@yahoo.com.br