With small, teeming cartoon scenes so boisterous that they frequently burst their borders, Williams (Bravo, Mr. William Shakespeare!, 2000, etc.) catapults readers headlong through five of Dickens’s best-known melodramas, introducing an array of curly-haired naifs, roundly vivacious young women, and pasty-faced villains, as well as those distinctively colorful supporting casts of orphans, convicts, ne’er-do-wells, widows, pickpockets, ghosts, and more—all of whom speak in snatches of Dickens’s own dialogue. Taking each tale’s original narrative voice, Williams fills in the gaps with necessarily substantial captions, and for additional atmosphere adds borders of dingy London rooftops, or groups of gnomes and other small creatures observing the action from the margins. Williams’s figures may be tiny, but their personalities are distinctly larger than life; just as Oliver Twist, Bill Sikes, icky Uriah Heep, Scrooge, Miss Havisham, and the rest came alive for Dickens, so will they come alive for readers years (or decades) away from tackling the full length originals. Pair this with Diane Stanley’s Charles Dickens: The Man Who Had Great Expectations (1993) to lay far, far better groundwork for a later appreciation of some timeless classics than filmed versions, or more conventional abridgements, ever could. (Picture book. 8-10)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7636-1905-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
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
In these 12 retellings, the Immortals come across as unusually benign. Dionysius at first suggests to King Midas that he give his excess wealth to the poor, for instance; the troubles that Pandora releases are originally imprisoned in the box by Prometheus’s brother Epimetheus out of compassion for humankind; and it’s Persephone herself who begs for a compromise that will allow her to stay with her beloved Hades for six months out of every year. Kimmel relates each tale in easy, natural-sounding language. And even though his Andromeda looks more Celtic than Ethiopian (as the oldest versions of the story have it), Montserrat’s figures combine appropriate monumentality with an appealing expressiveness. The stories are all familiar and available in more comprehensive collections, but the colorful illustrations and spacious page design make this a good choice for shared reading. (foreword) (Nonfiction. 8-10)
Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4169-1534-8
Page Count: 112
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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