"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title. There are lots of potential talking points in the pictures which could inspire some exciting art work. The gorgeous Arabian Nights - style pictures glow mysteriously as we follow the prince on his desperate mission to find and win his princess. The text is clear and rhythmic, and the images draw the eye again and again. Can Ivan win her back? Lee's oils in her picture-book debut are richly colored and finely designed, with swoops and curves and glorious patterns. Hoping to fix her in human form, the prince burns the frog skin, but she flees instead to her grandmother Baba Yaga. One night the prince sees her climb out of her froggy skin (the pictures of this are marvelous and entirely unrevealing) to do the work in beauteous human form. But will he ever have a flesh-and-blood human wife to call his own. A king tells his three sons each to shoot an arrow in the air "and seek your bride where the arrow falls." The youngest, Ivan, shoots his into the marshlands, where it lands near a "very small, very ugly frog." The queen puts three tasks to the frog and the two women the older boys find, and the frog performs them best. He marries the frog, only to discover that each night she changes into a beautiful princess. This sumptuous version of a traditional Russian story holds within it fragments of other fairy tales familiar to American readers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |