Bursting with flavor and good humor, this single long, lovely fairy tale bows to an abundance of classic tales while keeping everything fresh. Storm, champion maker of fireworks, and older sister Aurora, housekeeper extraordinaire and baker of madeleines, watch their useless parents disappear quickly (natch). Mother dies giving birth to verbally precocious baby Anything, and father wanders away in grief. The three sisters are a sweet household until lupine Dr. DeWilde comes seeking the small magical pipe that mother bequeathed to Storm. Frantically escaping, the sisters scramble through woods, enchanted towns, a candy-house orphanage, cottages, castles, ice fields and a mountain of slavery. Grey’s black-and-white drawings perfectly complement Gardner’s playful textual winks—both honor a cornucopia of archetypal tales, blatantly and subtly. The sisters’ story is a fairy tale itself, yet Rapunzel, Hansel & Gretel and The Pied Piper are also old books that characters read. It works because Gardner anchors everything warmly in Storm, who’s wonderfully genuine and full of resourcefulness. Delightful. (Fantasy. 8-11)
