Reviews: (by author)

Hans Christian Andersen (3 reviews)

Andersen, Hans Christian (retold by Kevin Crossley-Holland). The Ugly Duckling. Illus. Meilo So. New York: Knopf, 2001. $15.95. ISBN 0-375-81319-5.

Meilo So is extraordinarily talented and imaginative. The brush paintings of farmyard and creatures combine Asian technique with a lot of color and expressiveness, vitality and humor. The page layouts are unusual, utilizing space beautifully.

Crossley-Holland has cut out much of Andersen's story but has not rewritten what remains, so it still captures Andersen's distinctive style.

Highly recommended

A.A. Sp '03

Andersen, Hans Christian. Translated by Anthea Bell. Illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger. The Nightingale / Thumbeline. New York: North-South Books.
The Nightingale 1999. ISBN 0-7358-1120-2 (paperback). $6.95.
Thumbeline 2000. ISBN 0-7358-1213-6. $15.95.

The Austrian artist Lisbeth Zwerger, winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, is in my opinion one of the most interesting contemporary children's books illustrators. Her remarkable artwork for a number of classics, such as Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, goes far beyond simple "illustrating," instead opening new dimensions in these well-known texts. The same is true about her illustrations to famous fairy tales, including those by the Grimm Brothers, Wilhelm Hauff, Edith Nesbit and Oscar Wilde.

Zwerger's illustrations of Andersen's stories are highly original. Her Thumbeline, for instance, is not an ethereal creature, but a robust red-haired peasant girl. The pictures are marvelously dynamic and emotionally charged, emphasizing the complex relationships between the heroine and the surrounding world.

In The Nightingale, Zwerger refrains from imitating traditional Chinese art; her pictures are modern and eclectic, as is the tale itself. In this book especially, she chooses the least obvious episodes and figures of the story to illustrate, the result being that the pictures enhance the narrative rather then merely have a decorative function. They are simple, but elegant, and will appeal to most readers.

Reviewed by Maria Nikolajeva

Andersen, Hans Christian. The Emperor’s New Clothes. Illus. Virginia Lee Burton. NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. $16. ISBN 0-618-34421-7.

What a pair of artists! Andersen’s story is here broken up in Burton’s inimitable way so that digestible sections of words become part of the design of the entire page. Burton’s delicacy, her sense of movement and perspective, but especially the way she uses the whole pages—see pp. 22-23, 25—marks her work distinctively. Are 44 pages are magnificent. The details of her pen-and-inked watercolors are flawless—see pp, 38-39

She captures the elegance, snottiness, and self-delusion of the king and the crowd mentality of everyone else except the little child (no gender is stated) who loudly observes: “BUT HE HAS NOTHING ON AT ALL!”

I’d buy anything by Virginia Lee Burton, and The Emperor’s New Clothes is one of Andersen’s best stories.

Highly recommended
A. Allison Fall ‘04

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