Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Written for Ralph Waldo Emerson's daughter, Ellen, when Alcott was 16, and first published in 1855, these six prosy fairy tales were chosen from a 1992 collection, Louisa May Alcott's Fairy Tales and Fantasy Stories, edited by Daniel Shealy; Shealy provides an informative afterword here. Readers meet a cast of elves, fairies, brownies and sprites with such Shakespearean names as Willy Wisp, Moonbeam and Thistledown, and the children who occasionally dally with them. Thinly disguised morality lessons told in an over-upholstered style, they instruct the audience in the importance of various virtues. In "The Frost King," for example, elves resolve to conquer the ice-hearted ruler of winter through peaceable means ("Let us teach you how beautiful sunshine and love and happy work can make you"). More than a little dated, the stories grow tedious with lofty homilies (e.g., "little Annie dwelt like a sunbeam in her home, each day growing richer in the love of others and happier in herself"). Preiss's (The Pig's Alphabet) garish artwork further hampers an emotional connection to the stories. The lack of tonal subtlety is aggravated by a self-consciously multicultural-esque grouping of fairy folk with oversize but misshapen eyes and bizarrely pointed ears and chins. Even the typeface, which has distractingly flowery ligatures, is overdone. All but the most die-hard Alcott fans can skip this one. Ages 5-12. (June)
Independent Publisher
Flower Fables is a treasury of six different stories penned by Louisa May
Alcott. These old-fashioned fairy tales have been compiled and edited by Daniel Shealy, who has done editing on several Alcott books. The text is very readable, and has magic flavor added via the font's joining together of several letters. Today's children, like many children of the past, will enjoy meeting Alcott's fairies, sentient flowers, and other real and imagined characters.
Illustrator Leah Palmer Preiss has filled the book with delightful and intersting fairies and other creatures. The illustrations are bright and full.Readers may want to watch for the bonuses of quotations and tiny protraits of those who influenced Louisa May Alcott.
This book would make a good bedtime storybook, and like many tales of old, has good morals that children could take away with them perhaps without even realizing there was a lesson involved. The afterword is also interesting as it shares interesting details about Miss Alcott. For example, she wrote these tales when she was 16. Another bonus at the end of the book is the biographies that go along with the quotations and miniature portraits.
--SM Ford
Reviewers Bookwatch
Louisa May Alcott's "fairy folk" are back! Best known for her classic books Little Men and Little Women, her equally enchanting fairy tales are now reintroduced to a new generation of readers in this timeless volume of stories beautifully illustrated by the artistic talents of Leah Palmer Preiss with the publication of Flower Fables. This wonderfully delightful collection of six fairy tales and twenty-five newly comissioned illustrations permit the reader to enter ALcott's nature fairyland and meet her fascinating and memorable fairy folk. Flower Fables is a highly recommended addition to all personal, school, and public library
mythology, folklore and fairy tale collections.