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Books & Beyond: Old Favorites Made New Again
By Kathleen Krull
Newly retold, recast and re-illustrated editions of classics tales for children offer great opportunities to revisit old favorites with your kids.
Editor's Note: Books may be purchased online from Amazon.com by clicking on title or book covers.
Famed greeting-card artist Mary Engelbreit calls on parents to slow down and enjoy the simple life. Revisit the classic books of our youth, ease off of TV, video games, commercialism. Then she happily obliges her own request with Mary Engelbreit’s Mother Goose: One Hundred Best-Loved Verses (HarperCollins, $19.99). Mother Goose will never die, and here she oozes old-fashioned charm, from “Little Miss Muffet” and “Little Jack Horner” to “Hey Diddle Diddle” and “Three Blind Mice.” Gather wide-eyed young children around for a reading, and even those rhymes that have never made sense to you will seem charming. Classic fairy tales are always available, always reinventing themselves.
The Little Match Girl, by Hans Christian Andersen, is a touching tale – the poor little girl at Christmas, selling matches, lighting them to keep warm until she soars into a glorious dream of never being cold again. In this new version (Minedition/Penguin, $18.99), artist Kveta Pacovska fashions a bold, truly avant-garde book, with silver foil, gigantic matchsticks, and colors and shapes reminiscent of Miro, Kandinsky and Klee.
There may be more editions of Cinderella than any other fairy tale, but artist Barbara McClintock still makes the story her own (Scholastic, $15.99). She combines a readable text with expressive drawings that echo architecture and dress – as always, it’s about the clothes – from the era of Louis XIV and his palace at Versailles, all printed on elegant yellowing paper. This version concludes with an especially happy ending in which the stepmother is “terribly sorry” about the bad treatment.
