How Harry Hedgehog can help kids to love reading

This book could instil a love of reading in a child. It’s engaging, it’s tender and entertaining at the same time. It’s called The Adventures of Harry Hedgehog: The Quest for Honey, and it’s an adventure from cover to cover. Even for parents.

It’s author Sean Testa’s debut, and the backstory to the characters and the tale is just as cute as the paper narrative. It all started as a made-up song to entertain his baby son during playtime. Then, during another bout of load shedding, Eskom’s failings gave Testa the opportunity to turn a family favourite into a woodland adventure.

His son, now seven, was not quite a year old when Testa invented the little tune about Mr Hedgehog. There was no grand plan to become a children’s author at the time.

“I decided to turn that song, which had become something between my children and myself, into something more real, into a story, into characters,” he said.

Song inspired characters

And so, Harry Hedgehog acquired a personality, a home and a woodland full of friends. The story follows Harry and his companion Sami on an adventure to find honey. Along the way, they encounter other creatures, including Bella, a bee princess, in a magical world where even the smallest things in nature become part of their adventure.

Beyond the adventure and its colourful woodland characters, the book also introduces young readers to friendship, curiosity and discovery. Harry’s quest for honey takes him beyond the familiarity of his home and into a world where companionship and imagination are as important as the destination.

Testa, who has a day job and works at a law firm, said writing the first draft was surprisingly easy. He had already spent a lot of time imagining the story, so when he finally put pen to paper, the words came quickly.

“I wrote it by hand in a notebook. That’s the first time I wrote it down and committed,” he said.

But the story sat in his notebook for about six months before he returned to it. What followed was a lengthy process of rewriting and refining the narrative until he was satisfied that Harry’s adventure was ready for publication.

The illustrations were just as important as the words, too, because Testa wanted Harry’s world to look like a place that could exist somewhere in a forest. Of course, a place where hedgehogs go on adventures and bees have royal titles.

Lovely, tender tale

Instead of dressing the animals in little jackets, shoes and hats, their belongings are made from things found in nature. Harry’s travelling satchel, for example, is fashioned from leaves and held together with a porcupine quill. His home contains objects made from acorns, flowers and gemstones.

“What I wanted to do here is keep everything quite natural,” he said.

There are also little pieces of Testa’s family embedded into the story. Bella the bee was inspired by his three-year-old daughter Isabella, while his son is expected to feature in a subsequent adventure. Two more tales are already in the pipeline.

Ironically, Testa was not always an enthusiastic reader himself. His mother, a school principal. loved books but struggled to get her children interested in reading when they were young. It was becoming a dad that changed things, he said.

With a son and daughter asking for bedtime stories, books became part of his daily routine and reading to his children every night opened up the imaginative world of children’s literature and storytelling.

“My kids ask, ‘Please, tell me a story,’ and that’s how I started to read pretty much every single day,” he said.