Hans Christian Andersen's The red shoes and other tales

Three timeless stories receive visually beautiful and cogent treatment in this comics collection. In addition to The Red Shoes, which accounts for the majority of the volume, The Little Match Girl and the artist's own original The Glass Case provide contemporary readers with much to savor. Metaphrog's palette favors pastel washes with attractive brighter highlights (including the titular shoes) and simplified figures with doll-like faces. The varied panels and clearly depicted scenes offer interesting viewpoints of dramatic actions in both urban and natural surroundings. The Glass Case, set in a European city, tells of an abused and lonely boy who finds unlikely companionship with a doll from the city's Museum of Childhood. Both The Red Shoes and The Little Match Girl have an old-fashioned feel. Though the simplicity of line and verbal content are both elegant and accessible, the combination of fairly unhappy endings and pleasant yet wooden expressions cultivates an eerie, vaguely unsettling atmosphere. A worthwhile addition to collections of graphic adaptations of classic works.--Goldsmith, Francisca Copyright 2015 Booklist

In this comics collection, Metaphrog (a pseudonym for Sandra Marrs and John Chalmers) presents an early 20th-century update of Hans Christian Andersen's story about a girl transfixed by a pair of enchanted red shoes, pairing it with an original tale and a version of "The Little Match Girl." As the shoes take hold of Karen's mind and body, the tale's menacing plot is amplified through the use of a sickening gray-green hue that contrasts unsettlingly with the gleam of the red shoes and Karen's doll-like features. In the brief second story, "The Glass Case," a lonely, abused boy befriends an antique doll at a museum-eventually joining her in her display case; "The Little Match Girl" concludes on a characteristically sobering note. Hope, joy, and pain intermingle in these dark, alluring stories, which may leave readers thinking of Andersen as a precursor to modern horror. Ages 8-12. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Gr 3-5-This graphic novel anthology consists of two Hans Christian Andersen tales and one original story. In "The Red Shoes," Karen, a poor girl who loves to dance, is taken in by her wealthier great aunt after her mother passes away. She buys Karen a beautiful pair of red shoes from a shopkeeper with a demonlike appearance. On their way home, Karen and her mother pass another evil-looking man, a shoe shiner who tells Karen she must dance in her shoes. From then on, all Karen can do is dance. Karen is very doll-like in her appearance, with pursed ruby lips and unblinking eyes. She looks beautiful in the dance scene but otherwise lacks emotion. The ending, where the executioner chops off her feet, may be shocking to younger readers. "The Little Match Girl," nicely colored in sepia tone, is a tragic tale of a girl too afraid to go home after she is unable to sell her matches. As she lies dying on the snowy street, she is comforted by the visions she sees when she strikes her matches. This is the most emotionally drawn tale. "The Glass Boy," an original story about a boy who runs away to be with a living doll in a museum-and then turns into one-reads more like a Twilight Zone episode than a folktale. VERDICT While the tales are nicely adapted, there is nothing special here, making this collection most appropriate for libraries with a high demand for folktales in nontraditional formats.-Marissa Lieberman, East Orange Public Library, NJ © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

In this slim anthology, two of Hans Christian Andersen's timeless tales are visually reimagined and presented along with one original offering. Hailing from France and Scotland, respectively, Sandra Marrs and John Chalmers, collectively known as Metaphrog, have envisioned three dark fairy tales to make this slender collection. The first tale, Andersen's "The Red Shoes," is rendered in a muted palette dominated by washed-out blues and punctuated by splashes of rust-colored red. It recounts the familiar tale of a young girl obsessed with a pair of scarlet shoes that causes her to dance without end, until she must cut off her own feet to quell their perpetual motion (depicted graphically but bloodlessly). The second, "The Glass Case," is an original, sepia-toned tale of a young boy who's beaten and unloved at home and who befriends a doll at a museum, eventually running away to be with her. The final piece is the well-known "The Little Match Girl," which uses austere, glacial grays to tell the story of a young girl fruitlessly trying to sell matches on a cold, bleak winter night. Similar panel sizes and layouts and a homogeneous tone throughout create a smartly cohesive and atmospheric collection, each vignette made distinctive by a carefully selected color scheme. This is a must-read for fans of Emily Carroll's Through the Woods (2014). A darkly pensive read, perfect for chilly fall evenings. (Graphic fairy tales. 8-13) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.