The Princess and the pea

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The prince is looking for a true princess to be his wife, but all the girls he meets are too rude, too vain or too greedy. One stormy night a young lady knocks on the palace door claiming to be a princess, so the queen decides to put her to the test. Will she feel the pea underneath the huge pile of mattresses? This classic fairy tale is wonderfully brought to life with soft, colourful illustrations by popular illustrator Maja Dusikova. Colour throughout

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Publishers Weekly Review

Long before there were lie detectors, there was the great pea test: the real princess's genteel character is not numbed by 20 mattresses and 20 eiderdown quilts. She isn't lying when she says she felt ``something so hard that I'm black and blue all over.'' The pea becomes a museum piece, and at the end of this story the princess happily marries her prince, and their offspring go picking in a pea patch. Tharlet's narrative scenes are portrayed from an almost aerial perspective. Readers look down at castles, their majestic interiors and the people that inhabit them from a vantage point that reveals the artist's acute awareness of size and dimension as language for humor. All royal folk look alike, with their stiff upper lips, twisted noses and looks of perpetual surprise. Ages 4-8. (September) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

School Library Journal Review

K-Gr 3 This story of a princess chosen for her feelings rather than her beauty de serves retelling, and Bell's translation is smooth and fast-moving. All the charac ters in Tharlet's gentle gray and mauve pictures, even the ``old'' King and Queen, appear to be children in 18th-Century fan cy dress. Round-headed and with sharply- drawn cartoon faces, their short stature is exaggerated by the interesting, rafter-lev el perspective. The soft watercolors are particularly suitable for a story about re fined sensibility, as they create both the misty air and the comfortably elegant manor and furnishings of a small northern kingdom. Only the incongruity between the silly comic faces and the romantic set tings is disconcerting. Patricia Dooley, formerly at Drexel University, Philadel phia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Ages 3-5. In this version of the familiar story, Stevenson plays it for laughs; her prince and his prospective princess are a pair of funny bunnies. The scrawly artwork colored in pastels is at its best in the cover art, with the princess staring up at all those mattresses, and in double-page spreads such as the one of prospective princesses--mermaid, harem girl, and traditional among them. However, the telling is truncated and never really explains why feeling a pea through 20 mattresses would be indicative of a princess. There are a number of versions of the tale in print; the Janet Stevens offering [BKL S 15 82] is still one of the best, but libraries looking for something new may want to try this. ~--Ilene Cooper

Horn Book Review

In this French import, the familiar tale is blandly told in a brief text. The illustrations, however, feature whimsical details and are appropriate for the small format. The book includes an unnecessary picture puzzle involving plot order. From HORN BOOK Fall 1999, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kirkus Book Review

Andersen's featherweight put-on of effete snobbery at its silliest is so often taken straight, by children who earnestly debate its presumed moral, that Galdone's broad, pretension-pricking illustrations might be just what's required to draw laughs instead of indignation. The prince and princess are, as always, golden-haired and bland; the heartiest scene shows an endless stream of housemaids lugging the 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds; while the queen, who has devised the test, is all ugly elegance--and crafty but foolish. Whatever the intent, moreover, the scratchy parallel black lines that cover Galdone's gold and pastel fairy-tale colors often result in a shimmery look which gives the whole business the air of a mirage. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.