Why not crank things up a notch and hand a kid a collection of fairy tales full of strong, clever, wily female characters that have to use their brains? If you’ve waited for such a collection, brimming over with strange stories and illustrated with even stranger art, this is the book you didn’t know you deserved until it arrived. Fairytale feminism, old school style.
Want to look at Cinderella through the mores of the 21st century? I suggest pairing yourself up with an artist that’s been dead for 80 years. Why it’s so crazy, it just might work.
Interestingly, 2018 turned out to be a very strong year for folktales, fairy tales, and religious stories. Why? Well, look closely and you’ll see that this is nothing so much as a gathering of small publishers. It’s like I always say. The more the big guys consolidate, the more cracks and fissures remain for the little folks to sneak through. Here then are the titles published in 2018 that really stood out and shone:
Dwarf Nose By Wilhelm Hauff Illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger Translated by Anthea Bell Minedition $19.99 ISBN: 97898888341139 Ages 8-12 On shelves April 1st It seems so funny to me that for all that our culture loves and adores fairytales, scant attention is paid to the ones that can rightfully be called both awesome and obscure. […]
Fun stuff. Looks a lot like Harry Potter to a certain extent (mood, lighting, music, etc.). It’s the trailer for Roald Dahl’s The BFG. Thanks to 100 Scope Notes for the link! A bit of an older video here. In my travels recently I discovered that the entirety of the Oliver Jeffers short film version […]
Hansel and Gretel By Neil Gaiman Illustrated by Lorenzo Mattotti Candlewick $16.95 ISBN: 978-1-935179-62-7 Ages 6 and up When a successful writer of books for adults decides to traipse headlong into the world of children’s literature, the results are too often disastrous. From Donald Barthelme’s self-indulgent Slightly Irregular Fire Engine to the more recent, if […]
If you’ve sat in the audience during one of my talks of 2013, any of them really, then at some point during my presentation I probably mentioned that my deep and abiding love for small publishers is due, in no small part, to the rise in the fairytales and folktales in the marketplace. It’s not […]
I was going to spend a lot of time on this Fusenews. Then I picked up Doug TenNapel’s Cardboard and lost most of my evening in the process. So it goes. I really am going to have to be brief today. To sum up: The Battle of the (Kids’) Books rages on in earnest! Wish […]
The fabulous Colleen Mondor and Jackie Parker-Robinson have come up with a clever notion. Kidlitcon, the yearly conference for bloggers of child and teen literature, fast approacheth and this year, things are getting a bit switched. As Colleen says on her blog, “What we decided was to shift things just a bit, both by moving […]
It isn’t. I explain. A children’s librarian may sometimes spend a certain amount of time defending a child’s right to read fairy tales or books that reference those tales. So when a parent complains about the severed heads in A Tale Dark and Grimm or the girl dancing to her death in Breadcrumbs, the librarian […]
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