The first collaboration by this team took the stone soup motif and made it their own in Bone Button Borscht. This time, the story remains more firmly rooted in traditional soil. In this retelling of a traditional Russian tale (where the vegetable was often an enormous turnip rather than a potato), Aubrey Davis uses his paring knife to peel away almost all descriptive words and discards them, just like potato skins. The result is a clear, spare version.

I love the opening words: “There once was a farmer who had an eye.” They invite readers to study the first-page spread carefully and absorb the front and centre position that the potato takes right from the start, when it is but an eye. The story that follows is great fun: the potato grows and grows until it is time to harvest it. But it is so big and strong that not only can the farmer not budge it, neither can the collective efforts of his wife and daughter or dog and cat. It takes the addition of one more candidate – a mouse – to finally wrench the potato from the earth. And then begins the great feast (Eastern European-style – no radicchio here) to which all the townsfolk come. They eat until the potato is gone and, of course, by then, so is the story!

When a story like this one is retold for generations, it becomes so finely crafted that nothing is wasted and nothing is added unnecessarily. The Enormous Potato really works as a story for preschoolers: the cumulative details, the repetition, the exaggeration are all potent ingredients for a storyteller in the presence of small squirmers like your average three-year-olds. Add to this Dusan Petricic’s very funny watercolours and you have the recipe for controlled chaotic hilarity in the story circle. One question: I’m not certain why the sky is represented in mustard-gas yellow. The closest one gets to a sense of devastation of any kind is the appalling mess the townsfolk leave behind after the feast, but that’s surely no reason to feel that war is in the air.