Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Folk artist Moses recounts five familiar fairy tales-Little Red Riding Hood, Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White, Puss in Boots, and Beauty and the Beast-accompanied by his distinctively feathery, pastoral painting style. Moses's retellings are faithful and straightforward, and he strikes an old-fashioned tone in keeping with the look of the tiny images that pepper the pages. Each story concludes with an evocative full-spread painting that charts the key events of the story; in a painting for Beauty and the Beast, readers see Beauty's merchant father setting out on horseback at left, his first encounter with a fearsome horned beast along a winding trail in the center of the spread, and the Beast's courtship of Beauty unfolding on the right. It's a cozy, traditional collection, well-suited for brief, bedtime readalouds. Ages 3-7. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
K-Gr 2-Moses retells five fairy tales with his own style of casual narration and folk art illustrations. The basics of the stories will be familiar to children who have read "Little Red Riding Hood," "Rumpelstiltskin," "Snow White," "Puss in Boots," and "Beauty and the Beast," but Moses adds a bit of originality in the dialogue and in the characters' backgrounds. In Moses's version of the first story, readers learn it was Grandmother who made the red velvet riding coat and that the reason the tricky old wolf went to Grandmother's house was to eat the grandmother, the girl, and the pie and tea that Little Red Riding Hood was carrying in her basket. There are no happy endings for the villains in Moses's retellings. In "Puss in Boots," the ogre who transforms into a mouse is gobbled up by Puss, and in "Little Red Riding Hood," the woodcutter uses scissors to cut open the belly of the wolf. Several spot illustrations appear on the side of each page of the story, which are six to eight pages in length and adorn the end of the stories as double-page overviews of each plot and setting. Moses ends the book with a brilliant summary of why he believes it's important to read fairy tales to children. VERDICT This book conjures up excitement in readers by highlighting aspects of the original fairy tales and by introducing bits of new material in both the text and the illustrations.-Tanya Boudreau, Cold Lake Public Library, AB, Canada © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Moses illustrates "Little Red Riding Hood," "Rumpelstiltskin," "Snow White," "Puss in Boots," and "Beauty and the Beast" with folk artstyle oil paintings. Pages are dense with words; each tale is punctuated with a dozen or so vignettes and finishes with a double-spread landscape populated with miniatures. Moses has made minor embellishments to the tales; he doesn't acknowledge any textual sources. (c) Copyright 2016. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Moses' signature folk-art style is ideally suited to his retellings of five well-known fairy tales. "Little Red Riding Hood," "Rumpelstiltskin," "Snow White," "Puss in Boots," and "Beauty and the Beast" are the tales Moses includes in this collection, which concludes with a note to adult readers about the ongoing relevance and importance of fairy tales. As with any retelling, the question to consider is whether this collection adds anything new or otherwise distinguished to the fairy-tale shelf. A positive response rests in consideration of pacing and design: the collection uses two spreads per tale to tell the story in long blocks of text that are illustrated with a series of small vignettes. The fine details of the art on these pages are somewhat difficult to see, but the payoff comes in the third, wordless spread that concludes each tale. This incorporates the vignette illustrations from the prior pages to reveal a continuous narrative of the entire story on the facing pages. Here, Moses' skill as a landscape artist is on conspicuous display, and each scene invites reflection back on the story told on prior pages. The verbal storytelling itself is unremarkable, which ultimately makes the design of the book with its wordless spreads shine over textual achievement. A folksy visual treatment of tales for little folks. (Picture book/fairy tales. 5-8) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
