THE PERFUME OF MEMORY

A pretty and pleasing picture book in an unusual tall format, with a piquant story redolent of faraway places. Long ago in a place that has the look of North Africa, a perfume maker lives with his daughter. Girls aren’t supposed to make perfume—the result of an unfortunate historical blunder involving a girl, essence of skunk, and the Royal Advisor—but Yasmin does, and enters the perfume contest for the queen’s birthday. The queen is taken, however, by the “perfume of Forgetfulness,” and forgets who she is. Yasmin brings her back by offering her the scents of memory: the Casablanca lily from her parents’ home; the oils of myrrh and eucalyptus that anointed her when she became queen. The pages are lemon colored; the illustrations, with their echoes of Moorish decoration, are in golden-washed color enlivened by black-and-white sketches, in the manner of medieval drolleries, that reflect and augment the main images. Yasmin gets her wish, that a Royal Storyteller be named so no one would forget ever again, and the position goes to the Royal Advisor, imprisoned for his making of the perfume of Forgetfulness; “the first thing he wrote down was this story.” (Picture book. 4-8)