FAIRY TALE LAND

Twelve classic tales retold, in an oversized album, with each one’s setting depicted as a broad and verdant landscape.

Despite the book’s size and expansive perspectives, the interior art is the underachiever here, Clerc tending toward partial glimpses of widely separate buildings and scattered figures amid vast swathes of flowers and obscuring vegetation. On the other hand, many characters, including Dorothy and Snow White, are depicted as people of color. Davies obligingly alters the evil queen’s line to “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most beautiful woman of all?” and picks up the slack in other ways too, mostly in terms of gender equity. Along with embedding nods to other tales (naming Beauty’s beast Prince Caspian, for instance), she tucks in sly tweaks: “Dorothy felt as though she were living her life in black and white.” Though the stories are all the same four and a half pages in length, which is an achievement in itself, as the originals range from “Hansel and Gretel” to Treasure Island, they are admirably coherent and, often, entertainingly spun. Readers will cheer on Cinderella as she “boogie[s] around the dazzling ballroom” and later answers Prince Charming’s marriage proposal with “One day, maybe. But in the meantime, do you have a spare room in your palace?”

Sumptuous at first glance, but the reading will make a more lasting impression than the looking.