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Summary
Summary
Beware -- these fairy tales are not for the faint of heart! Maisy creator Lucy Cousins shifts gears to retell her favorites with vivid, rousing illustrations.
Eight classic stories take on new energy as Lucy Cousins ramps up her artwork. In this bold, funny, and unflinching collection, the beloved author-illustrator retains all the emotion and humor of the original fairy tales: the heroes are courageous, the villains are horrible, and the children are tasty. With her sly, simple language and vibrant illustrations, even the scariest fiends become the stuff of shared hilarity and shivery thrills.
Author Notes
English children's book author/illustrator Lucy Cousins was born on February 10, 1964. She studied at Canterbury College, received a BA Honours in Graphic Design from The Faculty of Arts and Architecture, Brighton Polytechnic, and earned a postgraduate degree from the Royal College of Art.
Cousins is best known for creating the popular Maisy mouse character for preschool children. Her first book was published not long after she finished college, and Maisy even has her own successful television show.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Anyone expecting the gentleness of the Maisy books in Cousins's retellings of eight fairy tales is in for a whopper of a surprise-although the cheeky title does provide a tip-off. Who knew Cousins could depict a wolf decapitation ("Little Red Riding Hood") or stewing ("The Three Little Pigs") with such relish? Or that she'd find a creepiness factor in the Henny Penny story worthy of Flannery O'Connor? Cousins embraces all the primitive, enduring fears and desires that drive these stories, and then beckons readers to hop on a rollicking narrative roller coaster ("I'm going to gobble you up," says a troll, threatening the biggest of the Billy Goats Gruff, who responds, "Then I'll bash you to bits"). There are thrills big and small on every color-saturated page: a Goldilocks who sports ginormous pigtails that seem to have an emotional life all their own; the hairy orange goat-eating troll with his neon green mani-pedi; a little red hen with enough feminine industriousness to rival Rosie the Riveter. Make room on the shelf. A new classic has arrived. Ages 3-up. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Lucy Cousins, best known for her Maisy picture books, presents eight familiar tales: Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, The Enormous Turnip, Henny Penny, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Little Red Hen, The Three Little Pigs, and The Musicians of Bremen. A glance at wolf on the book's jacket, sharp claws and teeth at the ready, will reassure readers that this is no pastel, bowdlerized version of folklore. Yes, a hunter chops off the head of Red Riding Hood's wolf, but the deed is so matter-of-fact in the telling and so bloodless and cartoon-like in the illustration that children are unlikely to flinch when justice is done. The writing is simple and direct, as befits these traditional tales. Illustrated in Cousins' signature style, the bold, childlike pictures feature broad strokes of black paint defining the forms of characters and elements of the setting. The scale of the illustrations is so large that their effect might overwhelm a bit when seen at close range. At a little distance, though, their clarity, drama, and energy are evident. Absolutely perfect for the youngest.--Phelan, Carolyn Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
COLOR is a funny thing. A phenomenon our brains cobble together from the data streaming in from our eyes, it fills us with a whole spectrum of sensations. We chop it up into categories, giving each a name. Then, our knowing the names actually affects how we see and think about the sensations. Here are three books all about color: one is about the names, one about the phenomenon, and one just lets those sensations do their work on us, in a gratifying way. "Red Sings From Treetops: A Year in Colors" is an illustrated poem chronicling the seasonal doings of Red, Yellow and so on, in atmospheric vignettes with a conceptual twist, and with exquisite results. The Red in the title is a cardinal, singing in springtime: "cheercheer-cheer, / each note dropping / like a cherry / into my ear." In summer, "White clinks in drinks." "Yellow melts / everything it touches . . . / smells like butter, tastes like salt." Joyce Sidman's language is vivid and deft. Slyly, she's conflating color as a sensation with color as a name: the words White and Yellow are stand-ins for ice and popcorn, the things they color. The rhetorical device is metonymy - calling an object by a related object or quality. It's wonderfully strange to read of colors with sounds, smells and tastes. But when "Red turns / the maples feathery, / sprouts in rhubarb spears," something stranger still is happening: Red is an essence, a primordial force that enters things, becomes and defines them. In winter, "Green darkens, shrinks, / stiffens into needles," a bracing image for winter's cold contractions. The language draws mystery and magic around the most familiar scenes. Edna the penguin finds "something else" besides black, white and blue in "A Penguin Story." Below, Henny Penny in "Yummy." There is no way for pictures to address this linguistic effect. The illustrator is obli- gated to paint a cardinal and ice, popcorn and pine trees. It may be the impossibil- ity of illustrating the central magic of the poem that led Pamela Zagarenski to pile on all kinds of other mystery, or at least mystifying details, in her delicately paint- ed scenes. Cardinals sing in the trees, but with crowns hovering over their heads. Images of birdcages and windows hang from the sky. To create a sense of story not present in the text, Zagarenski introduces a human figure or two; they are tiny-headed crea- tures in huge conical dresses, also wear- ing crowns and sometimes wheels under their feet. The paintings, while quite beautiful, feel obscure. A primitive quality in their style might encourage parents to give the book to children too young to respond to the poetry, but second graders and up, at least those who like language, should love it. Where "Red Sings From Treetops" plays with colors as words, Antoinette Portis's graphically bold "Penguin Story" is the polar opposite: a desire for new color experiences drives the plot. Edna the penguin, who knows only the white of snow, the blue of the sea and the black sky at night, is sure there must be "something else," and it's up to her to find it. The story, a quest to bring color into a lacking world, isn't new to children's literature, but that's all right; children who take to this book won't know the precedents. Edna's problem and its solution are a bit short on dramatic tension - her quest is fulfilled quickly and at little cost, as she stumbles on what appears to be a brilliant, orange rising sun. But the visual rewards are striking. On the next page that sun turns out to be an orange tent, part of a human expedition that includes a great deal of orange. It's no small pleasure in the written story that Edna's "something else" goes unnamed - the word "orange" never comes up. The drama is in the withholding, and little readers who know the word will want to shout it out. The same sort of withholding - of that new color, of what that sun really is - brings even more pleasure to the artwork. It's bold, simple, cleanly designed. Portis's penguins are pretty adorable, and when the whole rookery clusters knee-high around the expedition, helping them pack for home, it's a blissful scene of interspecies friendship. Color is at least as much a player in "Yummy" as in the other two books Lucy Cousins's collection of eight popular fairy tales simply delivers a lot of it. The traditional stories economically retold here (including "Henny Penny," "The Enormous Turnip" and "Little Red Riding Hood") usually feature pictures rich in detail:they work to give a flavor of the historical and cultural worlds that produced the tales. But Cousins's artistic style, closely resembling tempera painting scrawled by a child, is almost devoid of detail. Why does it feel so satisfying? Because the world of this book is, delightfully, a world made of paint. It's not history, not culture, but the feeling of the big, flat colored page that pulls you into the story. A jaunty humor shows itself in the blobby brushwork, but also in the expressions on the faces of wolves, hens or little girls (all wearing cheerful clothing of indeterminate period). Even the words get a chance to express themselves as paint: most spreads include something - a title, a quotation from the story or a bit of commentary - written across the page in thick black brushstrokes, like a child chiming in while a parent reads. It's a good take on these traditional tales for very young book-lovers. This is a book that will make you want to paint. Even if you don't immediately reach for the paintbrushes, "Yummy" offers a brilliant color experience and an introduction to fairy tales that everyone should know. You might be compelled to draw after reading "A Penguin Story," because those cute penguins are so simple practically anyone could make one. But read "Red Sings From Treetops," and I think you'll be more inclined to sing. In 'Yummy,' a jaunty humor shows in the expressions of wolves, hens and little girls. Paul O. Zelinsky has illustrated many books for children and won the 1998 Caldecott Medal for his "Rapunzel."
School Library Journal Review
K-Gr 2-Beloved classics are successfully served by these bold, striking renditions. There's no sugarcoating here, as the wolf in "Little Red Riding Hood" is shown receiving his gruesome comeuppance and Henny Penny's friends never return from Foxy Woxy's lair. Large, arresting gouache spreads in Cousins's signature style utilize saturated colors and thick, dark outlines against solid backgrounds. Expressive characters enhance the stories' shifting moods. Large type accentuates the dynamic texts, building each spare entry to its powerful climax. Crisp retellings of "The Little Red Hen," "The Three Little Pigs," "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," "The Musicians of Bremen," "The Three Billy Goats Gruff," and "The Enormous Turnip" round out this arresting volume.-Meg Smith, Cumberland County Public Library, Fayetteville, NC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
In a considerable change of pace, Cousins steps away from Maisy's toddler-friendly world for short but briskly savage versions of several classic tales. Here the Little Red Hen refuses to share her bread with anyone, Foxy Loxy gobbles down Henny Penny's companions one by one (though in a truly unjust twist Cocky Locky lives just long enough to warn Henny Penny away), the wolf's head goes flying (bloodlessly) as the woodcutter frees Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother and the Third Little Pig is last seen nestled in a comfy chair, smilingly watching the Wolf boil to death. Along with crowd-friendly illustrations done in her customary bright colors and broadly brushed lines, the author adds big hand-lettered taglines ("Bye-bye, Wolf") as cues for shouted-out commentary. Though the Three Bears look like teddy bears and as a concession to more pacifist audiences the author includes a severely compressed rendition of "The Enormous Turnip," on the whole this lap-sized collection offers younger children an eye-opening cross-section of the far-from-innocuous world of folk literature. (Folktales. 3-6) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
