Little Match Girl Week: More Picture Books

Here are some more Little Match Girl picture books. I am sharing reviews culled from several sources. Both Amazon and Barnes and Noble have reviews for different versions under the same title--in other words, reviews for one version listed under ones illustrated by someone else. The clues in the review help, but I have sorted the reviews with their proper editions below.

The first is still in print:


From School Library Journal (this review also includes Lavrey's Little Red Riding Hood:

Gr 1–3—The first retelling is true to the original poignant tale of hunger, cold, and the death of the young girl selling matches on the street. Lavreys's fanciful acrylic paintings soften Andersen's indictment of an indifferent society that allows such poverty and misery to exist. The resignation and calm on the girl's face capture her sadness, as does the artist's palette of soft colors. Bright colors, collage elements, and whimsical landscapes suit Little Red Riding Hood. The girl's coat is a collage of faint words, and she follows a path strewn with vowels through the sun-lit woods. A sinister wolf is coiled around a slanting tree and distracts the child long enough for him to arrive first at Grandma's cottage. This springtime version makes an interesting contrast to Jerry Pinkney's Little Red Riding Hood (Little, Brown, 2007), which takes place in winter. Lavreys's fanciful folk art expands the way young readers and listeners will see this familiar tale.—Mary Jean Smith, Southside Elementary School, Lebanon, TN

Lavreys is busily illutsrating more fairy tales, too, with her recent Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and forthcoming Cinderella.

This is another one of my favorite versions of the tale in picture book format and was referenced in the review for Lavreys's version above. It's still available in paperback but only used in hardcover. Here is Jerry Pinkney's Little Match Girl.

Jerry Pinkney is a much honored children's book illustrated and has started a mini-dynasty as the father of Brian Pinkney, another great illustrator.


From Kirkus Reviews:

Pinkney's deeply moving treatment of Andersen's classic tale moves the events to an urban America of the 1920s. On a freezing New Year's Eve, a girl stumbles outside in her stocking feet to try and sell matches. The jovial holiday crowd hustles by her; she is afraid to go home, where her father will beat her. To keep herself warm she lights her matches, and each blazes in a dream of holiday happiness. Her last vision is that of her kind grandmother, whom the child joins in a place beyond the reach of cold and poverty. On the last page, two shooting stars are shown blazing across the dark New Year's sky. Pinkney's detailed watercolors bring to life this cold winter night, and profusion of food and gifts just out of the girl's reach. Flecks of snow tumble across the outdoor scenes, and warm yellow candlelight make indoor settings look especially cozy. Pinkney's sense of pacing is also just right; readers will be captivated by the intimacy and drama his illustrations create. The result is so affecting that some will believe they're encountering this story for the very first time.

This final book is out of print and definitely one of the most avant garde of any fairy tale picture book retelling with its innovative illustrations by Kveta Pacovska with text retold by Anthea Bell (a prolific author of fairy tale picture books):


Publishers Weekly Review:

Bell (The Little Mermaid) renders Andersen's story with painful vividness, resisting the urge to draw attention to her own prose. Instead Pacovsk 's stark expressionist plates dominate the pages. An eminence grise among European illustrators, she fully exploits the media in which she works. Collages overlaid with pastel and felt-tip pen, printed on heavy, glossy stock, represent elements of the Little Match Girl's story. Her life unfolds as bold red-scribbling, terrifying chaos. Her frozen feet are white lines on black, while smaller drawings experiment with other deceptively simple ways of drawing feet and matches. A little red "WHoosh!" taped into a narrow gap between blocky, steel-gray apartment buildings indicates where she sits; later, a shooting star foretells her death. The star falls across a full-bleed spread, its path on the left page stenciled into shiny silver foil, like a lake or a mirror; the right-hand page depicts a series of pastel smudges arranged in a grid that seem to stand for the tears and dirt on the Little Match Girl's face, but also resemble an artist's palette. With smaller fragments of silver, the star strikes the heroine. Every page contains a similar shock, a moment of alienation, and yet viewers will likely feel the rightness of these images for one of Andersen's most disturbing stories. This rendering will be best suited to those who know the tale well and can appreciate this intellectual, abstract presentation. All ages.

Review from School Library Journal:

Grade 1-4–An internationally renowned Czech artist brings her avant-garde perspective to Andersen's timeless fable. Pacovská's playful art is challenging and experimental, featuring childish scrawls, bright smudges of color along with silver inlays, and whimsically amorphous figures. One illustration depicts the girl's eyes, nose, and cupped hands scribbled across what appears to be a financial balance sheet. One spread consists of squares of color smudges facing a shiny silver page on which readers find their own reflection. The two pages are linked by a multicolored paintbrush/matchstick form. The image of the matchstick recurs throughout in all colors and shapes, singly or in groups, some leaning at angles, some resembling picket fences. Though the art challenges, it is appropriately childlike and whimsical, and opens this classic tale to new interpretations. Thoughtful students of folktale will welcome Pacovská's brilliantly innovative vision.–Marilyn Taniguchi, Beverly Hills Public Library, CA

Review from Booklist:

Gr. 2-4. This striking picture book, with its smooth, able translation, presents Andersen's story of the little girl who stands out in the bitter cold on New Year's Eve, hoping to sell matches. When no one buys them, she lights her matches and sees beautiful visions in their flames. The next morning, she is found dead. Many illustrators have presented idealized visions of the match girl, which tend to sentimentalize her story, but Pacovska takes a different approach. Winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award for illustration in 1992, the artist doesn't depict the tale realistically or emphasize its pathos; instead, she offers expressive and sometimes expressionistic pictures. Even the placement of story and illustration is unusual. The entire text appears on five pages, interspersed among 12 full- and double-page illustrations. Featuring bold colors in mixed media, silver foil elements, and cut-paper collages, the striking artwork is naive in style but sophisticated in design. Often abstract and sometimes puzzling (a giant's body with a bird's head clutching a fork), Pacovska's highly original illustrations leave plenty of space for interpretation and imagination, especially for art students. Carolyn Phelan

Little Match Girl Week: Rachel Isadora (and some extras)

The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen and illustrated by Rachel Isadora is perhaps the most popular picture book version of the tale, staying in print since 1987 when it was first published.

Review from Publishers Weekly:

Andersen's tale about a little girl who's afraid to go home because she hasn't sold enough matches is a classic. The little girl, bareheaded and barefoot, curls up in a corner, lighting match after match to warm herself. In the flames she sees visions; in the final one, her grandmother appears and lifts the little girl into heaven. With muted blues, grays and browns, Isadora captures the mood of a snowy Victorian winter reminiscent of Dickens's A Christmas Carol. With these illustrations, coupled with superb book design, the artist has surpassed even the splendid art in her previous books.

The last few years, Isadora has published several fairy tale picture books with African settings and stylized illustrations, pictured below.


The Ugly Duckling


Hansel and Gretel


The Princess and the Pea


Rapunzel


The Twelve Dancing Princesses


The Fisherman and His Wife

Dixit Game

Dixit by Asmodée Editions is another game I discovered in my browsing this week. It is a storytelling game of sorts developed in France where it won best game of the year in Cannes as well as Games Magazine Awards Best Party Game 2010 Award.

The game is French, obviously, but has descriptions and instructions printed in multiple languages, conveniently one is English. What stands out about this game is how pretty it is. The art by Marie Cardouat is beautiful and features fairy tale imagery in general, not the specific. You can see more images on Board Game Geek. There will also soon be a Dixit 2 available as an expansion pack or stand alone game all its own. It is due out in 2010 from what I understand. When there is an expansion pack, one can assume the game is a bestseller. Just look at Carcassonne or Settlers of Catan games.

Here's a description of the game:

Each player at his turn plays the storyteller. He is given a single picture, while the other players get a hand of six pictures. The storyteller says a sentence or a word connected to his picture, then each player chooses one of his pictures to bet upon. All pictures are showed face up, and every player has to bet upon what picture was the storyteller's.

If nobody or everybody finds the correct picture, the storyteller scores 0, and each of the other players scores 2. Otherwise the storyteller and whoever found the correct answer scores 3. Players score 1 point for every vote gotten by their own pic.

The game ends when the deck is empty. The greatest total wins the game.

Now I have an Amazon link for this game above which allows me to use the game image without specific permissions--another reason I am an Amazon associate--but the game is currently way overpriced on Amazon US and can be found elsewhere on the web for under $50 USD. In fact, you could buy Dixit from Amazon.fr or even Amazon.co.uk and have it shipped internationally for less than $50 USD. The bargain hunter in me has to point that out.

Disney's The Snow Queen

Here's a link to SlashFilm's Exclusive: Disney’s Upcoming Hand-Drawn Movies Revealed, Including The Snow Queen by Brendon Connelly. The article is about Disney's plans to finally make a Snow Queen film and release it in a few years. The music will be by Alan Menken and the film will be hand-drawn animation, like The Princess and the Frog.

Now this isn't so much brand new news as a revamping of old news. The Snow Queen has been in development and on hold off and on at Disney for at least ten years. When I lived in Los Angeles, my husband and I were friends with some of the animators working on it in the preliminary stages while they were working on Atlantis, if that gives you a time frame. Then the lay-offs and move away from hand-drawn occurred and the project went on the back burner.

I will be interested to see how The Snow Queen is developed. The rough adaptation shared by the animators back then barely resembled Andersen's original tale. I was amused no end when the story told to me didn't resemble anything of the original--I think even Kai and Gerda's names were different. There was also much more of a love story in it, of course. Wouldn't be a Disney fairy tale without one...

Once again, I am always bemused by Disney fairy tales. I appreciate the publicity and notice of the tales, keeping them in pop culture and world view. I hate that the Disney version becomes the definitive version to so many people, removing many of the facets I love and making a straight out villain tale, although Snow Queen is much better suited to that storytelling method. Most people are completely unfamiliar with this tale. Some of the other articles about the Snow Queen preliminary art from Disney have commented on how she appears to be the villain and not the heroine. Those of us in the know, know that Gerda is the heroine.

On that note, December has become a month of theme weeks and I have already planned a Snow Queen week around the Winter Solstice. Consider it a boon to those of you who don't celebrate Christmas or perhaps even Hannukah or Kwanzaa or any winter holiday, or summer holiday for my readers on the opposite side of the equator. So stay tuned for many more entries about Snow Queen in a little less than two weeks.

Wonders and Marvels: History of the Fairy Tale Week

I've had a post about Wonders and Marvels in the preliminary stages for several weeks and this is the perfect time since next week the site is focusing specifically on fairy tales.

Here's a press release: “The History of the Fairy Tale” Week Begins December 13 on Wonders and Marvels.

All are invited to a weeklong celebration of the meaning and mystery of fairy tales.

Come hither into the marvelous, mysterious, complex and fascinating world of fairy tales for grown-ups at the Wonders and Marvels website all week beginning December 13. The History of the Fairy Tale week will feature guest blog posts, book giveaways, profiles of the earliest fairy tale writers, and much more.

“Fairy tales weren’t initially written for children. The earliest tales are full of sex, desire, and violence. Hardly the stuff of sweet dreams,” says cultural historian Holly Tucker, who curates Wonders and Marvels.

Among the guest posts from university professors and specialists of the fairy tale will be “5 Fairy Tales about Fairy Tales,” “5 of the Best Tales You’ve Never Read,” and “5 Reasons Why I Would Not Read These Fairy Tales to My Child.”

All week long, readers will be eligible to win copies of fairy tale collections such as The Complete Tales of Charles Perrault (Oxford University Press.) [Read SurLaLune's post about the book here.]

Those who wrote the earliest fairy tales were many times as colorful as their tales. Readers will be treated to the profiles of such fairy tale authors as Giovanni Francesco Straparola, Giambattista Basile, Madame d’Aulnoy, Charles Perrault, and Madame de Beaumont (author of “Beauty and the Beast.”)

Holly Tucker, a fellow Nashvillian who teaches at Vanderbilt (we've never met!), is the curator of Wonders and Marvels, a site that offers short articles about odd bits of history and other curiosities. The site doesn't discuss fairy tales in particular very often, but a few articles, especially about Little Red Riding Hood have appeared there before. She is also the author of Pregnant Fictions: Childbirth and the Fairy Tale in Early-Modern France. I recently posted about Tucker in In WSJ: Academic Studies of Fairy Tales.


Wonders and Marvels is offering the special fairy tale week in conjunction with the release of Disney's Princess and the Frog. The SurLaLune Blog will also offer a week of Frog Prince features--most of them not about the Disney movie--in conjunction with the film's release.

Little Match Girl Week: Striking 12 by Groovelily

Striking 12 by Groovelily is a musical of Little Match Girl for lack of a simpler explanation.

Here's more from the Groovelily website:

Striking 12 is the concert-with-a-story, band-is-the-actors GrooveLily secular holiday show that put us on the map of the musical theatre world. We wrote it with Rachel Sheinkin, who is now famouser for having won a Tony for the book of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. But we had her first.

“Striking 12″ is indeed a holiday show that has more heart and fun than most of the manufactured entertainments competing for your consumer dollars.
– Frank Scheck, The New York Post

…this modest show is more artfully crafted and engaging than virtually all the standard-mold musicals coming our way these days…The most important ingredient for a successful musical, it has long been acknowledged, is a first-rate score, and this one is terrific. The lyrics are alive with wit and humor, and they don’t shy away from surging emotion either. I was hooked by a single, lovely pair of lines that manages the tricky feat of encompassing both: “I would not dwell on the past/If time would not go by so fast,” Mr. Milburn sings in “Last Day of the Year.” The music is rhythmic pop founded on a rich vein of melody, with Ms. Vigoda’s electric violin adding a distinctive note to the clean but potent arrangements.
– Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

Performances of the show are popular this time of year, but you can also buy or download the music at various sources, including Amazon.

Groovelily also has another fairy tale oriented show, Sleeping Beauty Wakes.

And in the music vein for this fairy tale, don't forget my entry on The Little Match Girl Passion by David Lang which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Once Upon a Time Bingo

Found it! I wondered about a fairy tale bingo game a few weeks ago and I found one today. Turns out it is called Once Upon A Time Bingo Game and thus eluded my mad research skills.

This game is by eeBoo which has published many high quality children's games with fairy tale themes, most of which I have previously featured on this blog (see More Fairy Tale Games). I finally got to see many of these in person and they are printed on high quality paper and boards with good boxes. They are quite charming and I am even more impressed with them after handling them at a charming toy store. They are now higher on my personal wish list, too, I admit. eeBoo makes a fine product--these games do not come across as cheap generics but fun games featuring unbranded but recognizable characters.

Manufacturer's Product Description:

Fairytale characters and magical objects are featured on the pieces in the Once Upon A Time Bingo by eeBoo. Maybe a story will develop as you play! A character guide is included for each of the 36 tiles. 2 to 6 players Includes: 6 game boards 36 hexagonal tiles Hexagonal box is 8.75 x 10.

Once again, Amazon links are SurLaLune associate links but I have no other affiliation with the publisher or stores. See the disclosure notice link in the sidebar.