The Barefoot Book of Fairy Tales - Hardcover

Malachy Doyle began his career as a childrens writer in 1996 and was met with immediate success, having thirteen books accepted for publication within the year. He has also written Tales of Old Ireland (1-84148-279-X) for Barefoot Books. Malachy lives in Wales with his wife and three daughters. Nicoletta Ceccoli lives in San Marino, a small republic in central Italy. In 2000 she won the prestigious Andersen prize for the best Italian childrens book illustrator. Her other titles with Barefoot include An Island in the Sun (1-84148-197-4), The Faerys Gift (1-84148-997-2), Little Red Riding Hood (1-90122-326-4) and The Princess and the White Bear King (1-84148-242-0), all of which have received widespread acclaim.

PreSchool-Grade 5–Doyle has turned his fluent pen to the retelling of 12 folktales: five from Germany, and one each from Spain, France, Ukraine, China, Argentina, and what he calls Native America and Arabia. Unfortunately the language he employs in his narrations is no more culturally specific than the broad labels on the table of contents. So the Ukrainian Fool of the World looks down from his flying ship and says to the man below, Sure, youve a basketful of it on your back already! And the heads of the terrifying man-eating fish in the Chinese story The Jeweled Sea are described as being twice the size of a football. Such turns of phrase do not actually injure the plots of the tales, but they detract from the ethnic atmosphere that might have enhanced them further. The playful, colorful acrylic-and-pastel illustrations likewise err on the side of a comfortable lack of specificity. Ceccolis human figures, with their minimally rendered expressions and rounded shapes, resemble interchangeable figures in a dollhouse set. Taken as a whole, the collection may serve as a read-aloud, but it should not be relied upon as an accurate representation of the folklore of any of the cultures from which Doyle drew the stories.–Miriam Lang Budin, Chappaqua Public Library, NY
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.