Snail and Turtle Are Friends by Stephen Michael King

We're in that rather fortunate position right now in Australian publishing where children's picture books are of a quality and standard that is highly impressive.

Stephen Michael King has recently released the very colourful and charming Snail and Turtle Are Friends.

It celebrates similarities - "they like to..." walk, run & be quiet together.

But they also respect differences and enjoy diversity, when "snail likes to eat leaves... (and) turtle likes to eat flowers."

Each page is busy with details and things to spot.

Snail also leaves an embossed trail on some of the pages.

At story time we particularly enjoyed the page of snail and turtle running!

Snail and Turtle Are Friends is a sweet, simple story for 2-5 year olds about friendship and belonging.

Housekeeping

I've had a fascinating afternoon playing around with blogger - yes, that sound you heard about an hour ago was probably me...screaming!

But we are all wearing our happy faces again now :-)

It was brought to my attention that by using 'embedded' as my comment feed option that I was making it difficult for some non-blogger bloggers from commenting on my posts. Word verification options and registered user/google account were also mentioned as being a problem.
Now, I love hearing from others & what they're thinking about, so this concerned me.

I had removed word verification ages ago (to make it easier for people to comment) but added comment moderation for posts older than a week to keep a track of any spam. Since doing this I have no problems with spammers. The occasional one that gets through blogger goes straight to my inbox and I can delete it.

A month ago I switched to 'pop-up' instead, which apparently would made it easier for others to comment. I also moved to 'anyone' being allowed to comment on my blog.

BIG MISTAKE!

Within 24 hours I was swamped by spam emails and comments.

I quickly reverted back to 'registered users' and the spammers disappeared - phew!

I stayed with the 'pop-up' option for comments though as it seemed to be working fine. Until I realised that I couldn't reply individually to any of my lovely comments. My comments thread had disappeared!

Today I have googled my eyes out trying to find out how I can add a reply thread to pop-up comments. Result - nothing, nada, zilch, zip, can't be done.

My only option is to go back to 'embedded'.

I'm terribly sorry if this excludes anybody, but I NEED to reply! If you have any ideas on how to do this in 'pop-up' please let me know.

The good thing about my googling efforts though, is that I finally found out how to centre my blog name (above).
And I found a code for adding social media icons to my header (that rotate when you hover....yes, I'll wait while you try it out :-)

So the day was not wasted.

If I could only work out how to make the white section behind my blog posts that reaches all the way to the top of the page, transparent (like the header), then my blogging life would be complete!!

Onto other matters: I have decided to sign up for Paris in July.

If you'd like to register your interest, please click on the link here.

Until then...

Bonne lecture!

The Swap by Jan Ormerod and Andrew Joyner

The Swap tells that age old story of sibling jealousy.

When left in charge to mind her baby brother, Caroline decides to swap her dribbly, annoying brother for another. She tries out a baby elephant, a baby panda & baby tigers.

Unfortunately she experiences problems with all of them - too squirty, fussy eaters, too tiring etc.

By the end, Caroline realises that her baby brother is not so bad after all.

Andrew Joyner's illustrations have an old-fashion cartoon feel. His choice of colour palette ensures all the animals have a friendly, laid-back look. Joyner has added to the humour of the story via the facial expressions and actions of the characters.

The Swap will probably be this year's sentimental favourite for the CBCA nominations as sadly, Jan Ormerod passed away in January 2013.

In 2009 I had the pleasure of hosting a book event with Jan Ormerod and Margaret Wild to promote their latest children's book, Itsy-Bitsy Babies.

While Margaret read the book to the group, Jan drew quick portraits of the children. At the end, she presented the portraits to their delighted parents. It was a very generous surprise which we still talk about today.

Jan signing copies of Itsy-Bitsy Babies.

Jan drawing portraits.

Margaret Wild, me, Jan Ormerod

King Pig by Nick Bland

Nick Bland returns with another quirky, amusing picture book about friendship - although there are no bears - cranky, itchy, sleepy or otherwise in this book.

But there are sheep!

If you loved the kindhearted sheep in The Cranky Bear as much as I did, you will be delighted to see a whole flock of equally sweet-natured sheep in King Pig.

King Pig, himself, is rather rude, selfish, thoughtless, bossy & domineering. And he simply cannot understand why everyone does not adore him.

After pages of discontent and growing awareness, King Pig finally has an 'ah-ha' moment when he sees things from the sheep's perspective. He learns the importance of "being nice" and saying "sorry", then doing something about it.

It's not a 100% happy ending for everyone concerned, but we can all see (along with the sheep) that King Pig is trying to change and trying to be more thoughtful.

King Pig has been shortlisted for picture book of the year in this year's CBCA awards.

Parachute by Danny Parker and Matt Ottley

Parachute is a celebration of imagination.

It is also a gentle story about fears, childhood, growth and change.

This is the third time that Parker & Ottley have worked on a picture book together (Tree and No Kind of Superman).

I've had a thing for Matt Ottley's illustrations ever since Sailing Home with Colin Thompson (I really must review this book one day!)

Like Sailing Home, Parachute glories in the impossible becoming possible and the unusual becoming reality.

With a riot of colour and flights of fancy, Ottley adds humour and daring to Parker's evocative text.

Parachute has been shortlisted for picture book of the year in this years's CBCA awards.

Violet Mackerel's Possible Friend by Anna Branford

Violet Mackerel's Possible Friend is Branford's fifth book is this lovely, lovely series. 

It is also the second time that Branford has been shortlisted for the CBCA (her first book, Violet Mackerel's Brilliant Plot received the honour award in 2011).

In the Brilliant Plot we meet young Violet and her mum as they are getting ready to go to work in their stall at the local markets.

Violet tends to be a worrier but she doesn't let it stop her. 

When she spies a beautiful blue china bird at one of the stalls she becomes determined to earn the money to buy it.

This is a story that celebrates the small things in life. It also cherishes family, friendship, honesty, perseverance & environmental awareness.

The following books see Violet admitted into hospital to have her tonsils out, rescue wildlife and attend her mother's marriage to Vincent.

Book 5 picks up the story after the wedding and their move into a new home together.

Violet is anxious about making new friends in her new neighbourhood. Will there be anybody? How do you make new friends? What do you say? What do you do?

In Violet's inimitable way, she comes up with the "theory of swapping small things."

She decides to leave a small parcel and note in a knothole in the fence. When she returns later, Violet is delighted to discover her note gone...and a new one in its place.

Violet shows us that a good relationship takes time & that differences can be a little off-putting. But, ultimately the shared experiences and the shared joy of a true friend are worth it.

The gorgeous hard cover books are lovingly illustrated by Sarah Davis.

Perfect for the developing 6-8 yr old reader.

The Queen's Hat by Steve Antony

I read this picture book to my story time group last week. It was a lot of fun.

The typical windy day/hat chasing scenario that we've seen in many picture books before, has been given a little pomp and ceremony in The Queen's Hat!

The Queen of England loses her hat as she is about to leave for a very important visit.

What follows is a delightfully proper chase through the streets of London with the Queen, her corgi, a butler and a whole tribe of guards in train.

We see them scrambling over the lions in Trafalgar Square, up Big Ben, around the London Eye and across Tower Bridge.

A delightful Mary Poppins-style finish sees them all parachuting back to earth with their umbrella's...to land outside Kensington Palace...where the Queens regains her hat, takes baby Prince George (her very important visit) for a stroll in his pram, as the butler prepares afternoon tea.

All very proper and English!

Antony's precise line drawings, small colour palette and clean, simple details add charm and humour to this simple story. I read on his blog that he loves "big bold Pop Art" which is evident in these illustrations.

At storytime we enjoyed trying to spot the Queen, her hat and the corgi on every page.
Will you be able to find them too?

Treasure Box by Margaret Wild & Freya Blackwood

I read Treasure Box months ago but I had forgotten just how moving and tender the story is.

This is a tale, at first glance, about war, persecution and refugees. But hope, dignity and courage are at its heart.

A library is destroyed by bombs and all the books burnt...except for the one that the narrator's father had borrowed out before for the blast.

When they are forced to flee, they carry the book (that describes their history) in their treasure box.

Later, as the father lays dying he entrusts the book to his son.

Time passes, peace arrives and the boy, now a man, is able to return to the area where he buried the treasure box for safe keeping.

Treasure Box is a homage to words, the importance of history, memories and belonging. In fact, I suspect this book will be used by primary schools and high schools to develop topics of belonging & peace.

Blackwood's layered collage pictures are subdued & sombre at times. Fragments of paper and words float around her pages and find their ways into objects & people.

I've included several examples of Blackwood's pages - they grow on me the more I see them.

Treasure Box has been shortlisted for this years CBCA picture book award.

Yoko's Diary edited by Paul Ham

Yoko's Diary edited by Paul Ham has been shortlisted for this years CBCA Eve Pownall award for Information Book.

Yoko was a 13 yr old girl living and going to school in Hiroshima in 1945.

The first section of this book is dedicated to the process of bringing her diary to light.

It explains how Australian author & historian, Paul Ham became interested in her story.
We meet her half-brother, who survived the atomic bombing, but spent his life grieving the loss of his sister. And how a TV program in Japan sparked off the idea to publish Yoko's diary.

Other family members & school friends provide more background information - about Yoko, the war, life in Hiroshima and how survivors were treated after the war.

Ham includes family photographs, maps and copies of letters.

Yoko's actual diary takes up the second half of the book. It concerns itself with her day to day life. Ham has inserted at regular intervals throughout the diary information pages to further explain some of her comments i.e. 'rationing', 'letters to the soldiers', 'some school rules', and 'battle of Okinawa.'

Her last entry is on the 5th August, the day before the atomic bomb.
On the morning of the 6th, Yoko was part of a school working group doing demolition work in the city - they were only 700m away from the epicentre of the blast.

Ham finishes with a touching letter from the woman who nursed Yoko in her last hours.

I can see this book becoming very popular (and useful) in Yr 6/7 classes discussing WW2 & memoirs.

Meet...Captain Cook by Rae Murdie & Chris Nixon

I had put off reading through this CBCA shortlisted book as I feared a heavy-handed, worthy attempt at distilling historical facts into young children's minds!

Imagine my delight when, instead, I found an easy to read, lighthearted and even humorous tale that begins with...well, the beginning!

"Before Captain James Cook became a famous explorer, he was...a baby born in a two bedroom cottage...a schoolboy...a farmboy..."

The story features Cook's first voyage in the Endeavour to chart the transit of Venus and to explore the southern ocean for Terra Australis.

Nixon's illustrations are imbued with lovely, earthy colours. A nostalgic feel is conveyed via the clean, stylised, detailed scenes. The adult Cook is drawn with straight lines and sharp angles which makes him stand out/apart from the more flowing, gentle background scenes.

There are now 5 books in the Meet... series all written and illustrated by different people - a 6th book is due out in October Meet...Nancy Bird Walton. (Click here if you'd like to see the other 5 books). They are all easy to read snapshots of famous Australians.

The Murdie/Nixon combination is my favourite one so far.
Keeping a narrower focus than the other 4 books, has actually allowed them to concentrate the amount of detail & personality into a more satisfying & complete narrative.

Silver Buttons by Bob Graham

I should declare up front that I am a Bob Graham fan.

When I was teaching, Rose Meets Mr Wintergarten & Queenie the Bantam were two of my favourite story time reads.

However I found that many of Graham's other books worked better in a smaller group or one-on-one.

There is always so much going on in his stories, in a quiet, day to day, routine kind of way.
His deceptively simple, uncluttered illustrations are packed with extra details - just perfect for sharing and discussing over and over again.

I've always loved Graham's families and his sense of community. Time, change and continuity are important ideas in all his books. To this end he usually provides a timeline or map to highlight these themes.

Silver Buttons is no exception.

The story within these pages imagines all that can happen in just one minute - the big stuff and the little stuff - everything is significant & important in it's own way.

"...at 9:59 on Thursday morning, Jodie drew a duck....Her pen hovered in the air for the final button..."

As Jodie finishes her drawing, her brother Jonathan takes his first steps in front of her...each page then draws us further out from this point...to the kitchen where we see mum playing a song on her flute...into the neighbour's yard and on into the street. Past the shops, the park & a falling feather. A mother farewell's her soldier son, a shoelace is tied & a homeless woman walks by with a trolley full of her possessions. In the local hospital a baby is born. On to the beach and out to sea where a tanker makes its way to China.

We come back to earth as Jonathan totters & stumbles - Jodie draws the last button & mum rushes in at the sound of Jonathan falling - as the clock strikes 10:00am.

"I loved making this book probably more than any other. It was just like dropping a stone into a lake of very still water and watching the ripples spread out."

(Bob Graham)

Silver Buttons has become one of my favourites too. It's Graham at his best - oozing warmth, humanity and compassion.

It is shortlisted for this year's CBCA picture book award and for me, it's the stand out winner!
(Graham's CBCA track record is pretty impressive by the by - winning 6 times over the past 26 years - will this be his lucky seventh?)

The Windy Farm by Doug MacLeod and Craig Smith

The Windy Farm has been shortlisted for this years Children's Book Council Award for best picture book.

It uses fairly typical Aussie humour & a sense of the ridiculous to deliver an environmental message.

Flying pigs, greedy uncles & extreme weather conditions all add to the sense of fun. But it's the inventing mum who problems solves our way to a satisfying ending that steals the show.

As with all good picture books, Smith's illustrations complement and add to MacLeod's cautionary tale.

Sustainable living, shared community effort and enterprise are all rewarded in this fun story for 4+ readers.

Friday Barnes Girl Detective by R A Spratt

Friday Barnes is a lot of fun. She's smart, sensible and slightly socially inept.

Her parents are the stereotypical scientist types - too busy with their experiments to parent their youngest daughter.

Left to her own devices, Friday begins solving local crimes thanks to her amazing observation & deduction skills.

With the money she makes from solving a bank robbery, she sends herself off to Highcrest Academy...which turns out to be a hotbed of minor crimes and mysteries.

Friday solves the case of the missing clock, the disappearing homework and reveals the truth behind the mysterious swamp creature.

Spratt has written a funny, fast-moving detective story for good 10+ readers. She has also left the way open for book #2 Under Suspicion, which is due out January 2015.

Book one - Friday Barnes Girl Detective will be published by Random House Australia in July.

The Fall River Axe Murders by Angela Carter

I've had a lovely morning visiting all the other posts for Angela Carter Week.

I've even had some time to read articles and papers about Carter and her work. They have helped me clarify many of her themes and intentions.

I've included sections of two reviews that I found particularly relevant below.

I have been surprised by how absorbed (alright, obsessed) I have become about Carter this week.

Although I shouldn't have been.

The year I read Bettelheim's Uses of Enchantment (about 1994 I think) I became absorbed (alright, obsessed) with the psychology of fairy tales.

During my teaching years I observed how certain books & stories would get under the skins of certain classes, groups and individuals.

With Bettelheim in mind, I would try to ascertain the fear, the desire or underlying feeling that was drawing a child to a story. It was fascinating how a child would request a book over and over again, sometimes for months on end. It was so obvious that it was fulfilling some deep need within the child.

And then, all of a sudden, it would be over.

The need was satisfied, the fear forgotten, the idea resolved.

The spell was broken, the story no longer required.

But never completely forgotten - I still recall the stories that obsessed me as a child - they still give me little shivers now - Rose Red & Snow White, Rumplestiltskin, Enid Blyton's The Secret Island)

These are the kinds of stories that Angela Carter writes.

She has got under my skin. She has tapped my deep-seated feminist yearnings and she has stirred up all sorts of psychological & intellectual desires.

Carter draws propulsive energy from the big clanking madhouse of the English past. She loves circuses, crumbling mansions, toyshops, trains, horses, and prisons. She echoes Keats, Blake, Browning, the Brontës, and Milton. Like Hilary Mantel (“the wars unfought, the injuries and deaths that, like seeds, the soil of England is keeping warm” in Bring Up the Bodies) or Alan Garner (the Roman legions — or are they Cromwell’s soldiers? — in Red Shift), Carter is alive to the technical possibilities of history, the way war and murder and intrigue transcend time and bend backward to repeat themselves. 

She sees a lot and wants to get it all in. Yes, sometimes she overreaches. But in men’s writing, this kind of ambition and scope seldom gets called “too much,” even when it is. 

Women writers struggling to shake off the mind-forg’d manacles of good-girl self-policing and literary-industrial pigeonholing can take heart from her. She blows out the hesitancies and the self-sabotaging that silt up inside us. She makes us want to shake off the clinging of "have to" and "ought to" and get our own bloody work done before it’s too late. She makes us want to be as bold as she is, in ways that suit our own materials. And she helps us see how that might look.

Amy Weldon LA Review of Books 20/9/2013

In 1979, two years after translating a selection of Perrault's fairytales, Carter published The Bloody Chamber, a series of "revisionings" of some of the best-known fairytales, including Bluebeard, Red Riding Hood and Beauty and the Beast. 

The book is a supremely well-achieved critique and reformulation of stories that have been shaped by our society, and which shape it in turn. In the 1970s, myth and folklore was coming under fresh scrutiny in numerous ways – Bruno Bettelheim's Freudian reading in The Uses of Enchantment, Ann Sexton's poetry cycle Transformations, the incisive critiques of Jack Zipes – but nowhere is the strange, warped power of the originals harnessed so strikingly as in Carter's work....

Alongside these inversions are stories in which the hidden content of fairytales is made explicit. 

Most indelible of these is The Fall River Axe Murders (1987), her study of the allegedly murderous New England spinster Lizzie Borden. Here, the discord between Carter's forensic tone and fairytale details – a wicked stepmother who "oppressed her like a spell'; the detail that virginal Lizzie is menstruating on the day of the murders; talk of slaughtered pet pigeons baked in a pie – instils a heavy, malign tension. Carter, wickedly and perfectly, breaks off her account moments before chaos is unleashed, the story left like a blood blister about to burst.

Chris Power The Guardian 23/3/2013

To finish Angela Carter week I will leave you with The Fall River Axe Murders.

The premise behind retelling the murky events of the 1892 Borden murders reminded me of Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace. So much speculation & inaccuracy - biased reporting confused with facts & changing stories.

A fairy tale step-mother, a hot, sultry day, locked doors, greed & gluttony, an axe and a menstruating prime suspect - all perfect fodder for a Carter story!

To this tale she also adds a sense of destiny and her usual discussion on humanity - what makes us human? how do we tame the beast within? what is the role of nature in a civilised world?

Living in Australia, the Borden murders were completely unknown to me. Google revealed hundreds of theories and opinions. For a rational discussion of the evidence I found the Crime Library's article enlightening.

Emma & Lizzie Borden

No wonder Carter was so attracted to this case.

A mythology has built up around this gory story - childhood games and rhymes have been penned, movies made, history rewritten numerous times - it's a fairy tale just waiting to be.

No-one will ever know the truth, but Carter extracted her own truth - a universal truth - the consequences of a repressed, loveless life.

What the girls do when they are on their own is unimaginable to me.

Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber - the rest!

For Angela Carter Week I've been reading my way through her short story collection, The Bloody Chamber.

I've already reviewed the title story, The Bloody Chamber and the three cat stories. This post is dedicated to the remaining stories in the collection.

The Erl-King was an unusual story based on a German folk story that I was totally unfamiliar with.

Traditionally, the erlking is the king of the fairies or elves, a mischievous, possibly dangerous being responsible for trapping humans to satisfy his desire, jealousy or lust for revenge.

It is also the title of a well-known poem by Goethe that ends with these chilling lines...

                           "Dear father, oh father, he seizes my arm!

The Erlking, father, has done me harm.

The father shudders, he darts through the wild;

With agony fill him the groans of his child.
He reached his farm with fear and dread;
The infant son in his arms was dead.

The Erl-King by Chloe North

I'm not quite sure what I made of Carter's version though!

There are references to Little Red Riding Hood,

"There are some eyes can eat you."

but this young woman is not an innocent child setting off into the woods, like Little Red Riding Hood.

This is a young woman battling with her competing impulses for independence and domesticity. This is a search for identity,

"It is easy to lose yourself in these woods."

"The two notes of the song of a bird rose on the still air, as if my girlish and delicious loneliness had been made into a sound."

"I know it is only because he is kind to me that I do not fall further."

"His touch both consoles and devastates me."

And in this case, her identity and quest for independence is strongest, and the Erl-King is murdered so she can be free.

The Snow Child is the shortest story in the collection and probably the darkest and most disturbing.

The original tale is also a dark one about wish fulfillment, trust, fidelity, jealousy and revenge.

Carter does all this, but also adds a Sleeping Beauty element

"So the girl picks a rose; pricks her finger on the thorns; bleeds; screams; falls."

& an unpleasant incest scene. This Snow-Child is nothing but a figment of the male imagination.

From Stranger Than Kindness

The Lady of the House of Love completes the three odd, disturbing, unrelated stories in the middle of the collection.

This time Carter has combined aspects of Sleeping Beauty and Jack and the Beanstalk with vampire mythology to create another heroine trapped by her destiny,

"Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?"

Our hero is rational behaviour personified. 

She is compelled to destroy the man who can save her; he is saved by his innocence and untapped sexuality...only to head off to the trenches of WW1 France.

The final three stories are wolf stories that reference Little Red Riding Hood.

The Werewolf is short and too the point. A tale of competing females; this Little Red Riding Hood is strong and knowing, 

"The child had a scabby coat of sheepskin to keep out the cold, she knew the forest too well to fear it but she must always be on her guard."

And, once again, murder is the only way to secure her independent future,

"Now the child lived in her grandmother's house; she prospered."

The Company of Wolves follows a similar line to The Tiger's Bride where we see the young girl bare all; shed her clothes, to become one with the werewolf,

"The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody's meat."

It would seem that by accepting and embracing our 'beastly' natures, we can find true love and live out our true-to-self lives.

Gina Litherland

Finally, Wolf-Alice falls into the child raised in the wild scenario. 

Carter explores what it means to be human - frailty, flaws and all. 

Alice is raised by a pack of wolves, 

"Nothing about her is human except that she is not a wolf; it is as if the fur she thought she wore had melted into her skin and become part of it, although it does not exist. Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future."

The Duke is "damned" - half man, half beast, he

 "haunts the graveyard; he believes himself to be both less and more than a man, as if his obscene difference were a sign of grace. During the day, he sleeps. His mirror faithfully reflects his bed but never the meagre shape within the disordered covers."

Wolf-Alice becomes more human, but retains enough beastliness to save the Duke so that

"at last as vivid as real life itself, as if brought into being by her soft, moist, gentle tongue, finally, the face of the Duke."

Thank you for coming on this epic, bloody journey with me. 

Angela Carter gets under your skin; she disturbs your senses and she oozes semi-colons like blood on the snow!

Thank goodness I found an old forgotten copy of Burning Your Boats on the bottom of a TBR pile concealed behind a cheval mirror (I kid you not! How Carteresque!)

Hopefully I will fit in a few more short stories before the 15th.

In the meantime...

This post counts as one of my TBR Pile Reading Challenge and Eclectic Reader (Gothic) books.

Happy Black Friday!

Happy Full Moon!

Superstitions collide as three independent variables - moon phase, weekday & day of the month - come together. 

The next full moon, black Friday wont occur again until 2049.

Howl, hibernate and stay safe!

Angela Carter - the cat stories.

The Courtship of Mr Lyon and The Tiger's Bride are the next two tales in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber anthology. These two are based on the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast.

I was a little let down, but only a little, after the heady, gothic delights of The Bloody Chamber. They seemed less dangerous and therefore, somehow, less delicious.

Beauty and the Beast is a traditional tale that asks questions about our humanity. What are the signs of civilisation? Morality? Good manners?

Mr Lyon is very courteous and generous - providing food, shelter & help to Beauty's father in an Alice in Wonderland (eat me, drink me) kind of way.

When the father steals the white rose and tries to justify his behaviour, it is the Beast who seems more honorable, in my favourite passage of this story...

"There is always a dignity about great bulk, an assertiveness, a quality of being more there than most of us are. The being who now confronted Beauty's father seemed to him, in his confusion, vaster than the house he owned, ponderous yet swift, and the moonlight glittered on his great, mazy head of hair, on the eyes green as agate, on the golden hairs of the great paws that grasped his shoulders so that their claws pierced the sheepskin as he shook him like an angry child shakes a doll."

Ultimately, of course, Mr Lyon, the Beast was rescued or transformed by Beauty, which sounds quite traditional and uncontroversial.
It's not until we read its companion story The Tiger's Bride, where it is Beauty transformed or rescued by the Beast, that we see the trademark Carter twist.

The Tiger's Bride is a darker, crueler tale.
The father is a selfish gambler who loses Beauty in a card game.
But the Beast is also more beastly and inhuman in his own right.

"I never saw a man so big look so two-dimensional."

"only from a distance would you think The Beast not much different from any other man, although he wears a mask with a man's face painted most beautifully on it."

"He wears a wig too, false hair tied at the nape with a bow....And gloves of blond kid that are yet so huge and clumsy they do not seem to cover hands."

"He is a carnival figure made of papier mäché and crëpe hair."

"he has such a growling impediment in his speech that only his valet, who understands him, can interpret for him."

Carter plays with the idea of baring oneself - one's skin, one's heart, one's soul - until, finally, the Beast is unmasked and Beauty is uncloaked. She feels 'flayed', 'stripped' and 'peeled'.

"'He will lick the skin off me!'"

leaving behind  "a nascent patina of shining hairs...my beautiful fur."

Rather satisfying, I have to say!

Puss-in-Boots follows the traditional tale of success and survival of a very cheeky and worldly ginger cat.

Carter's version is a naughty delight from start to finish.

The story is told from Puss' point of view, with saucy humour and savoir faire. Below are two of my favourite quotes to show you how much fun Carter has with the language in this tale...

"I observe with my own eyes the lovely lady's lubbery husband hump off on his horse like a sack of potatoes to rake in his dues."

"they strip each other bare in a twinkling and she falls back on the bed, shows him the target, he displays the dart, scores an instant bullseye. Bravo!"

Carter explores her usual themes of morality and feminism. Adultery, trickery and murder have to be done to achieve this happy ever after. And the happy ending clearly provides all parties with choices in a very un-fairy tale like way...

"So may all your wives, if you need them, be rich and pretty; and all your husbands, if you want them, be young and virile; and all your cats as wily, perspicacious and resourceful as: 

PUSS-IN-BOOTS."

What's not to love?