This smart and quirky story focuses on how we present ourselves to the world and how we want to be seen by others. It features a series of animals sharing their grand, playful aspirations. The rock star pig imagines performing on stage alongside a wild boar. The elegant cockatoo, a highly fashionable bird, dreams of being painted by a famous artist. A high-jumping athletic frog wants to become the greatest soccer goalie ever. Gottwald uses a bright, saturated color palette that immediately captures a child’s attention and matches the book’s energetic tone. The backgrounds are kept simple and clean, which keeps the focus entirely on the animals’ highly expressive faces and comical body language. The artwork combines flat shapes with mixed-media textured layers, giving the characters a tactile, slightly retro feel. The book uses a repetitive, rhythmic structure that works perfectly for reading aloud, and it concludes with an empty frame that invites young readers to imagine how they would capture themselves in a photo.
Title: Click! Snap! Picture That!
Author: Dieter Boge
Illustrator: Benjamin Gottwald
Publisher: North South Books. New York
Copyright: 2026
Original Language: German
Translator: David Henry Wilson
Original Title: Alle wollen ein Bild: Aber nicht irgendeins
Original Publisher: Aladin in Thienemann-Esslingen Verlag
Original Copyright: 2024
ISBN: 978-0-7358-4638-8
Hardcover pages: 48
Age range: 4-8
Genre: Picture book
Author’s ethnicity: German
Author’s residence: Germany
Illustrator’s ethnicity: German
Illustrator’s residence: Hamburg, Germany
Awards: German Youth Literature Award (illustrator)
Subjects: Identity, Imagination, Pictures, Visual literacy

