The Bostonians

Grade 3-7-Large print, short chapters, and an abundance of white space provide an attractive, more-accessible option for readers who are not ready to handle the originals. At best, this approach works as a vehicle to deliver the basic elements of the stories while providing an entertaining, simplified version of the classic at a lower reading level. After all, many of our cultural references would be lost on readers who don't know what Jekyll and Hyde represent, or what consequences the creator of Frankenstein faced. At worst, the sometimes-stilted language reads like awkward translations. What is missing, of course, is the very language that makes these classics so evocative of their time. Victorian London, for example, is captured so much more readily with the elegant and dramatic prose of Robert Louis Stevenson. If presenting Classic Starts, do so with a recommendation: when you are ready, read the originals. There can be no substitute.-Elizabeth Fernandez, Brunswick Middle School, Greenwich, CT
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Frankenstein, loved by many decades of readers and praised by such eminent literary critics as Harold Bloom, seems hardly to need a recommendation. If you haven't read it recently, though, you may not remember the sweeping force of the prose, the grotesque, surreal imagery, and the multilayered doppelgänger themes of Mary Shelley's masterpiece. As fantasy writer Jane Yolen writes of this (the reviewer's favorite) edition, "The strong black and whites of the main text [illustrations] are dark and brooding, with unremitting shadows and stark contrasts. But the central conversation with the monster--who owes nothing to the overused movie image ... but is rather the novel's charnel-house composite--is where [Barry] Moser's illustrations show their greatest power ... The viewer can all but smell the powerful stench of the monster's breath as its words spill out across the page. Strong book-making for one of the world's strongest and most remarkable books." Includes an illuminating afterword by Joyce Carol Oates.