Dragon Feathers
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illustrated by Olga Dugina & Andrei Dugin, retold by Arnica Esterl |
Floris |
9780863157745 |
September 2010 |
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The well-known traditional tale about a woodcutter’s son on a mission to pluck three feathers from a dragon’s back. The book was first published in German as Die Drachenfederen in 1993, and Floris Books is to be congratulated for bringing it to an English reading audience (translation by Polly Dawson) because the illustrations by the husband-and-wife illustrating team are exceptionally good and, on some of the spreads at least, medieval in their attention to detail. |
Nut Cracker
Jan Pienkowski/David Walser |
Puffin |
978-0141384542 |
Autumn 2008 |
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The Fables of La Fontaine
Jean De La Fontaine, Trans. C. J. Moore, Ill. Jean-Noel Rochut |
Floris Books |
0863155715 |
Sep 2006 |
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A well developed literary palate has a taste not only for fiction and fact, but also for folk-tales, for poetry, for drama and for fables. French poet and fabulist Jean La Fontaine (1621-1695) took inspiration from Aesop, Horace and the Panchatantra for his own three collections of fables. |
Cyrano
Geraldine McCaughrean |
Oxford University Press |
019272603X |
January 2006 |
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Cyrano de Bergerac and his cousin Roxane are a couple of literature’s most frustrated lovers. Fifteen years after the death of Roxane’s late husband, Christian de Neuvillette, their relationship remains constrained by his memory. |
Wenceslas
ill. Christian Birmingham text by Geraldine McCaughrean |
Doubleday |
0385605358 |
Nov 2005 |
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I stupidly over-wrote this review when adding a new one. If someone has my original words saved in any format I’d be grateful if they could send them to me so that they can be reinstated. What I remember saying is roughly this: McCaughrean’s text (taking its cues from J. M. Neale’s well-known carol) is pitch perfect from the start: “So great fires were burning in every palace grate, and twelve days of Christmas feasting lay ahead, silly with song and dance!” Don’t you just love that ‘silly’? |
Ithaka
Adele Geras |
David Fickling Books |
1904442714 |
Oct 2005 |
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Anything from the David Fickling YA stable is likely to be substantial, well-written and worth a lot more than a glance. The 400-page Ithaka lives up to these expectations: and yet, for all the brain fodder it offers, all the drama, the big human questions and the beautifully-crafted language, one can’t help wondering how many teenagers will really go for this. |
The Fairy Tales
Jan Pienkowski (translated by David Walser) |
Puffin |
0141382244 |
Oct 2005 |
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This is a sumptuous season for fairy tales. Lauren Child’s covetable version of The Princess and the Pea is the sort of book all real princesses will want to hoard beneath their pillows. There is the much less crafted, but fun, Mixed Up Fairy Tales, from Hilary Robinson and Nick Sharratt, which lets children play around with all the familiar components – like the old game of Tops and Tails ‘ so Goldilocks can be bossed around by two horrid stepsisters, then move in with seven dwarfs before being woken by a band of forty thieves. |