Fairy Tale Land

October 4, 2021
Strange realms and enchanted kingdoms recur in this appealing collection of gently updated classics that encompasses mostly European fairy tales and stories, including Robin Hood, “The Snow Queen,” and Treasure Island, Davies’s retellings deftly preserve the originals’ sense of magic while recontouring plots to better suit modern sensibilities—in “Beauty and the Beast,” the Beast needs friendship, not love, to break his curse, and in “The Little Mermaid,” the mermaid chooses to return to her family, spurning the shallow prince: “I have my own palace, thank you.” Clerc’s intoxicatingly detailed, lushly colored illustrations are richly botanical, offering a riot of blooms and branches, with protagonists of varying skin tones. Each tale is capped with a full spread landscape depicting the story’s setting, even if distracting asides offer unnecessary commentary (“Cinderella’s sisters are mean and cruel—avoid them”). Casts a charming spell all its own. Ages 7–10.

September 1, 2021
Twelve classic tales retold, in an oversized album, with each one's setting depicted as a broad and verdant landscape. Despite the book's size and expansive perspectives, the interior art is the underachiever here, Clerc tending toward partial glimpses of widely separate buildings and scattered figures amid vast swathes of flowers and obscuring vegetation. On the other hand, many characters, including Dorothy and Snow White, are depicted as people of color. Davies obligingly alters the evil queen's line to "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the most beautiful woman of all?" and picks up the slack in other ways too, mostly in terms of gender equity. Along with embedding nods to other tales (naming Beauty's beast Prince Caspian, for instance), she tucks in sly tweaks: "Dorothy felt as though she were living her life in black and white." Though the stories are all the same four and a half pages in length, which is an achievement in itself, as the originals range from "Hansel and Gretel" to Treasure Island, they are admirably coherent and, often, entertainingly spun. Readers will cheer on Cinderella as she "boogie[s] around the dazzling ballroom" and later answers Prince Charming's marriage proposal with "One day, maybe. But in the meantime, do you have a spare room in your palace?" Sumptuous at first glance, but the reading will make a more lasting impression than the looking. (Illustrated stories. 7-10)

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