Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Tibo's interpretation of Poe's well-known poem portrays a fisherman's son sharing the joys of the coast with a playmate who dies and is borne away by a ghostly schooner. (The book's flaps imply that she was imaginary, although the text and art themselves do not dictate a single, unambiguous reading.) The full-page, airbrush illustrations are strikingly beautiful, full of mood and mystery. They are most powerful in the scenes following Annabel's demise, where they suggest the commingling of loss, loneliness and memory, and where the play of moonlight on the sea and land is truly haunting. Earlier scenes, still appealing, have less emotional impact. The figures in them have mannequin-like faces; and the girl appears fully corporeal, without the aura of otherworldliness that attends the poem and the later illustrations. Ages 12-up. (October)
School Library Journal
Gr 6 Up Tibo's stagy illustrations, lightly misted and suffused with a mildly eerie inner glow, form an adequate accompaniment to Poe's famous paean to idyllic love lost. Ignoring the vacant-eyed faces of the children, one can even admire the modulation of the artist's palette, as the initial pastels change to a darkling combination of blues and blacks complementing the downward spiral of the text. The real question, however, is not one of synchronizing words and pictures but of choice: why illustrate this particular poem at all, let alone in picture book format? The language is certainly vivid enough to evoke its own images, unaided by artistic intervention. Although ``Annabel'' has doubtless plucked many a prepubescent heart string (when longing for lost love may seem much less threatening than hanky panky in the last row at the local movie theater), these illustrations are too young for that age group. And what the post-sandbox set could or would make of ``sepulcher there by the sea/ In her tomb by the sounding sea,'' is something else altogether. Such expenditure of artistic effort should be preceded by educated selection. Kristi Thomas Beavin, Arlington County Public Library, Va.
