Back when I was a living, breathing, and frequently underprepared children’s librarian I used to keep a stash of surefire, one-size-fits-all picture books for last-minute emergency storytimes. Included in this stash was Jim and the Beanstalk by Raymond Briggs, a book that saved my bacon during many an unexpected preschool visit. Were I to assemble such a first-aid kit today, I would certainly include Boy Soup, Loris Lesynski’s first picture book. It’s a story that shares with the Briggs book a strong plot with just the right blend of predictable and surprising, rhythmical language that trips off the tongue, bold energetic pictures, an inventive kid-inspired solution to the plot’s dilemma, and at the centre of the book, a giant who is simultaneously threatening and pathetic.

Lesynski’s giant has a cold and his Giants’ Home Medical Guide suggests Boy Soup. This prescription would have been very bad news for the boys that the giant captured for ingredients, were it not for the fact that he also captured the doughty Kate, a girl not to be trifled with. With a little inventive trickery Kate persuades the giant that Boy Soup is made not of but by boys. She and her sous-chefs cook up a gigantic vat of foul soup for the malingering giant, who then spits it out with a mighty blast that blows all the children home. Inspired by their culinary adventure the boys and Kate open a restaurant and I, for one, want to go there.

The story is a dandy one but it is better in Lesynski’s words than mine because she gives us the tale in rhyming couplets that roll right along with nary a stumble: “With sofa-sized fingers, he leafed through the book, and in between sneezes so loud that he shook, he found all his symptoms – page seventy-one: queasiness, wheeziness, coughing begun. Completely depleted, and tending to droop. The only prescription? A bowl of Boy Soup.”

In such words and in bright cartoon pictures (the finger-sofa scale of sizes remains satisfyingly consistent) we make our way to the dénouement – a contrite giant and an appetizing blue plate special.