The Little Red Riding Hood (A Bodley Head fairy tale picture book) - Hardcover

Perrault, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0370011481 ISBN 13: 9780370011486

Publisher: Bodley Head, 1972

Synopsis

The Little Red Riding Hood walks through the woods to deliver food to her sickly grandmother. A Big Bad Wolf approaches Little Red Riding Hood and she naïvely tells him where she is going. He suggests that the girl pick some flowers. In the meantime; he goes to the grandmother's house and gains entry by pretending to be the girl. With modern illustrations. Classic translation by Robert Samber. Raconte l’histoire d’une petite fille qui traverse la forêt pour apporter un morceau de galette, une bouteille de vin à sa grand-mère. En chemin, la fillette fait la rencontre d’un loup, qui la piège à la fin et la dévore elle et sa grand-mère.

About this title

About the Author:

Jennifer Shand lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with her husband Ryan. While growing up in the Shenandoah Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, Jennifer voraciously read fantasy and adventure stories, and had fun taking adventures of her own. Jennifer enjoys reading, going for walks, hikes, bike rides, and traveling, but most of all she loves to write especially stories that help make learning fun.

From School Library Journal:

Grade 4 Up-- From the cover illustration, which both descends from and pays tribute to Gustave Dore's wood engraving of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, to the melancholy black endpapers, Montresor has provided a reinterpretation that is both astonishing and esoteric. Although Montresor chooses to omit it, Perrault himself appended a highly didactic moral in verse. In it he warns ". . . pretty girls, who're bred as pure as pearls,. . . they may serve one day as feast for a wolf or other beast." It is the subtext and cryptic nature of the tale that Montresor enlarges and underscores masterfully. In disturbing illustrations heavily overlaid with black, he piles up images and scenes that will haunt readers: a graceful prepubescent Red Riding Hood who is watched silently by the town's women and girls, voyeurs at some obscure rite of passage; the encounter with the beguiling, dapper wolf; the palpable pause as Red Riding Hood stands, uncertain at the dark forbidding threshold of Grandmother's house; the wolf greedily devouring Red Riding Hood head first; three wordless illustrations following the end of the text in which the girl floats cruciformly, transformed and serene, within the distended belly of the wolf--seemingly ready for rebirth, absorbed into the unending chain of reproduction. While Montresor offers an ostensibly straightforward text, he has altered Perrault's original intent both by omitting the concluding moral and by silhouetting the figure of the Grimms's hunter on the final plate. His daring, enigmatic illustrations, saturated with layers of mysterious symbolism, are clearly his vehicle for reinterpretation. It is difficult to assign an appropriate age for this work, but it clearly does not belong on the picture-book shelves. Large folklore collections should consider this provocative version that will reward with endless possibilities for study, discussion, and comparison. --Kate McClelland, Perrot Memorial Library, Greenwich, CT
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bodley Head
• Publication date: 1972
• ISBN 10: 0370011481
• ISBN 13: 9780370011486
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 32