Once upon a Fairy Tale: Four Favorite Stories

A colorful collection of four popular nursery tales is retold by more than twenty celebrity authors and illustrators and includes a CD of the famous celebrities--such as Kelsey Grammer, Kevin Kline, Whoopi Goldberg, and Hugh Grant--performing their favorite tales. 30,000 first printing.

K-Gr 5-This collaborative production, a fund-raiser for the Starbright Foundation, which helps seriously ill young people, takes readers on a romp through four familiar folktales: "Little Red Riding Hood," "The Frog Prince," "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," and "Rumplestiltskin." Celebrities such as Barbra Streisand and Nicolas Cage speak as characters from the stories, each using a distinctive voice, which readers can hear on the accompanying CD or read on a single page. A picture executed by a well-known illustrator faces each page of text. Children who know the classic versions of the stories will appreciate the way the retellers cleverly insert motivation and new contexts, giving old tales a distinctively modern spin. For example, Glenn Close, as Red Riding Hood's mother, worries because her nearsighted daughter went off to Granny's house without her glasses. Oprah Winfrey speaks as Alberta Louise Johnson, Red's grandmother, while Jerry Pinkney portrays her in the moment before the wolf swallows her whole. The best combination of voice, art, and text might be Ted E. "Papa" Bear, a gruff, thousand-pound "family man" whose story is told by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf and illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg. While the book is designed more for private purchase than for library collections, teachers and librarians may find it a useful and entertaining way to teach point of view, and illustration aficionados will appreciate the gallery of widely divergent art. Photographs of celebrities and artists are appended, along with brief summaries of their achievements.

Margaret A. Chang, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, North Adams

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