Too twee for its own good.
Annabel’s curious about witches; will that be the end of her?
Annabel’s writing a book about witches. The white Londoner wants to know everything about them. When she meets Patrick, a green-haired white boy, on the top deck of a double-decker bus, he informs her he can tell her everything about witches—but it’ll be dangerous. Annabel’s still eager; he takes her down a street she’s never seen even though it’s near where she lives and introduces her to his mother, Mrs. Rainbow. They take her to Maxim’s All Night Diner, where all manner of strange creatures gather and trade stories. There, Annabel learns she’ll have to tell a story, and she may be trapped in that story (especially since Mrs. Rainbow has cursed her for saying “please,” which witches cannot abide). After several wild tales, it’s Annabel’s turn. Will she survive? Haugaard’s self-consciously whimsical debut is a meandering and, at times, nonsensical muddle. The stories-within-a-story conceit gets away from the author early, due mostly to tricky use of punctuation conventions. Stories are initially introduced as spoken dialogue but then lose their quotation marks, presumably to make it clear when characters within them are speaking, but they are so short and dialogue tags elided often enough that readers may find themselves confused as to which story they are in. Poor copy editing compounds the confusion.
Too twee for its own good. (Fiction. 8-10)Pub Date: May 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-911427-00-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Everything With Words
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
Alert readers will find the implicit morals: know your audience, mostly, but also never underestimate the power of “rock”...
The theme of persistence (for better or worse) links four tales of magic, trickery, and near disasters.
Lachenmeyer freely borrows familiar folkloric elements, subjecting them to mildly comical twists. In the nearly wordless “Hip Hop Wish,” a frog inadvertently rubs a magic lamp and finds itself saddled with an importunate genie eager to shower it with inappropriate goods and riches. In the title tale, an increasingly annoyed music-hating witch transforms a persistent minstrel into a still-warbling cow, horse, sheep, goat, pig, duck, and rock in succession—then is horrified to catch herself humming a tune. Athesius the sorcerer outwits Warthius, a rival trying to steal his spells via a parrot, by casting silly ones in Ig-pay Atin-lay in the third episode, and in the finale, a painter’s repeated efforts to create a flattering portrait of an ogre king nearly get him thrown into a dungeon…until he suddenly understands what an ogre’s idea of “flattering” might be. The narratives, dialogue, and sound effects leave plenty of elbow room in Blocker’s big, brightly colored panels for the expressive animal and human(ish) figures—most of the latter being light skinned except for the golden genie, the blue ogre, and several people of color in the “Sorcerer’s New Pet.”
Alert readers will find the implicit morals: know your audience, mostly, but also never underestimate the power of “rock” music. (Graphic short stories. 8-10)Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59643-750-0
Page Count: 112
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
The small, novel-like format (5.5 x 8 inches) will most likely appeal to reluctant or recently independent readers, who...
This much-abridged recreation of the famous tale by Hans Christian Andersen is smoothly told, following the original structure of seven short chapters, while leaving out numerous details and the Christian elements of the original.
Characters (a wolf) and incidents (a final confrontation between Gerda and the Snow Queen) have been added. Because of the elision and truncation of incidents from the original story, Gerda’s quest is less immediate and heart wrenching, and the motivations of many of the characters she meets are harder to understand. For example, it is not clear that the old woman with the magical garden tries to keep Gerda with her because she has always longed for a daughter, nor is the precarious situation of the outlaw’s daughter, who, in the original, sleeps with a knife at her side, apparent. The sophisticated, surreal and dreamlike illustrations created through mixed media, including manipulated photographs of dolls, flowers and paper constructions, often charmingly spill over onto the pages of text.
The small, novel-like format (5.5 x 8 inches) will most likely appeal to reluctant or recently independent readers, who might be encouraged by this simple retelling to seek fuller versions of the tale. (Fairy tale. 8-10)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-84686-662-3
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Barefoot Books
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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