Marie Day’s story and illustrations throw light on a subject relatively rare in picture books – human prehistory. In this imaginative recreation of a prehistoric community, Day combines speculative and factual material to describe how cave paintings came to be.

This is Day’s second book about prehistory; her first, Dragon in the Rocks, told of the life and discoveries of the early paleontologist Mary Anning. In Quennu and the Cave Bear the reader is plunged immediately into the distant past as Quennu and her people are preparing for a journey into the caves to “make magic.” Quennu is a confident young girl, unafraid of woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers but nervous about the shaman’s stories of huge cave bears. Separated from her brothers, she ventures through the tunnels alone and confronts her deepest fears of what might be lurking in the dark. When she eventually reaches the torch-lit cave, she joins artists painting on the walls, and creates her own vision of the great bear. In its story of a young girl conquering her fears on a strange underworld journey, Quennu and the Cave Bear is an interesting companion to Ian Wallace’s much-loved The Very Last First Time.

Day has included many details about the materials used in cave paintings, and in an afterword notes how such paintings were created all over the world. Day’s art in this book suggests the cave paintings of Lascaux and makes dramatic use of a combination of watercolour and print-making techniques. There is a problem with balance in the story: after Quennu’s fright in the tunnel, the story loses momentum, and the painting scene seems anti-climactic. Power returns, however, with the concluding image of Quennu’s painted bear, still waiting somewhere in the dark.