The Runaway Dinner was published by Candlewick Press. It was written by Allan Ahlberg and illustrated by Bruce Ingman.
There’s boy called Banjo and one day his sausage runs away. Other things also ran away such as the knife, the plate, the table, food and so on. Banjo runs after the sausage that he desires so much to eat but in the end realizes that he shouldn’t eat something that’s been on the ground. By the end of the story all of the runaway items/food have unique fates.
I’ll admit I enjoyed the illustrations much more than the story in The Runaway Dinner. It’s all written in a very casual style with the author using “well” every once in a while to start sentences. Some of the naming of characters is amusing (the carrots all use names that start with C and the peas names start with P. Towards the end of the story the sausage runs out of stream is about to be eaten and two pages are dedicated with the text, ate him so I think this story would be suited for children that have an understand of the alphabet.
The illustrations save what may have been a plain story. Many of the illustrations take up two full pages and we really get a sense of the sausage running hard! illustrator sometimes leaves some characters transparent which emphasizes the objects in color.
The Runaway Dinner is a fairly long read for a fully illustrated picture book and is easy on the eyes (colors).
