Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
A robust translation of the classic tale, with Zemach's charmed paintings of the carnival-like events. Ages 3-up. (September)
School Library Journal
Gr 2-4-- An outstanding mixed-media production of the classic tale of greed and granted wishes. The book alone warrants purchase. The language retains an old-world flavor through its formal and evocative wording, while presenting the story in a thoroughly accessible and comprehensible manner. Metaxas has resisted including editorial comments that might have compromised the intellectual challenge of the tale's moral, unlike some other versions currently in print. Inky black cut-out silhouettes set against vivid single- color backgrounds depict the action of the tale. While the text is fairly traditional, the illustrations are surprising and refreshing in their interpretation of the tale. Bryan has enhanced the exaggerations in the story with absurd anachronistic touches such as an old-fashioned pipe stove next to one of those cat clocks with a swinging-tail pendulum popular in the '50s. Her fisherman's hovel even sports a television and electric lamps. The audio cassette recording consists of a mesmerizing reading by actress Jodie Foster with a hauntingly beautiful sound track by Van Dyke Parks. An especially satisfying sensory experience. --Dorothy Houlihan, White Plains Pub . Lib . , NY
Kirkus Reviews
Continuing her career through the classic fairy tales, Isadora turns to the familiar story of overweening greed for her latest adaptation. As with Princess and the Pea (2007) and Twelve Dancing Princesses (2007), she relocates the European tale to an unspecified African shore, employing her Eric Carle-like collage technique of placing broadly painted cut-outs against a white background. As the story runs its course, the wife becoming greedier and greedier and the flounder waxing angrier and angrier, the painted ocean modulates from turquoise to gray and stormy, taking over the page in nicely terrifying fashion as jagged blades of rain stab its surface. This tale adapts to its new setting somewhat better than her previous efforts, perhaps because of the universality of the themes, perhaps because the tight focus on the two characters allows them to develop fully. As the wife declares that being Pope isn't good enough-she wants to become God-she and her husband appear silhouetted against a rising African sun, God's creation surrounding her-a nicely ironic image beautifully executed, making this offering fresh and welcome. (Picture book/fairy tale. 4-8)
