Deborah Apy

Use: Treat each other with respect.
Media: strange. dark. bright. pastels?
Genre:fairy-tale.

Beauty lived with her wealthy family. She had brothers. I never knew that before. She was kind and caring and extremely young. Her sisters were not nice to her. Disaster struck and they had to move. She toiled hard outside. Her father went to check on an investment which ended badly and ended up finding a rose in a garden. Beauty had asked for a rose. The garden belonged to a 'creature' or 'monster' and he asked for Beauty as payment. A chest appeared in their house with jewels and butterflies. Beauty goes to Beast. There were a bunch of birds in a room. Beauty lived with Beast in content for three months. Beauty sees her dad. She sees a strange garden with an inscription in it and a unicorn. The Beast is dying and Beauty is sad so she tells him she loves him beast and all and he turns into a Prince and they get married and live happily after.… (meer)

Originally published in 1980 by the Green Tiger Press - a small, independent publisher based in Seattle, WA, that produced beautifully illustrated fairy-tales, and other children's books - and then reprinted in this 1983 edition by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Deborah Apy's retelling of the classic French story of Beauty and the Beast is based upon the version first recorded by Mme. le Prince de Beaumont in 1756, and accompanied by the artwork of Michael Hague. Text-heavy for a picture-book (one might almost say it was more of an illustrated chapter-book, with the occasional full-page illustration), the tale will be engrossing for older readers interested in the genre, but undoubtedly beyond the younger children who are normally considered the target audience for picture-books.

I enjoyed this version, which I have owned for some years, but never seem to have gotten around to, although I did find myself wondering, as I read through, just how faithful it was to the le Prince de Beaumont version. It's been a few years since I read Zipes' translation (which is probably the best available in English), but I don't recall there being any unicorns in the fairy-tale, not even in the dreams sent by the good fairy watching over Beauty during her stay in the Beast's palace. Then again, Michael Hague is known for his depiction of unicorns (as well as teddy-bears, oddly enough), so perhaps Apy deliberately inserted them into her story, in order to provide him the opportunity to include them in his paintings? I think I will have to reread the original again, sometime soon, to make sure!

In any case, I appreciated the artwork in this Beauty and the Beast, although I didn't (as is usual with Hague's work) love it. I grew up on his version of The Wizard of Oz, and can never really dislike his work, as a consequence, but it is never exactly what I want, either. His Beauty simply doesn't appeal to me, and his Beast is an odd mix of lion and ram. On the other hand, the scene where Beauty and her father open the chest and are surrounded by butterflies (in the original? or not?) is irresistibly magical, as is the scene in which the winged fairy floats outside Beauty's curtained bed. All in all, this is a retelling with both narrative and artistic appeal, despite being somewhat uneven, and although it will never be one of my favorites (for that, see: Max Eilenberg and Angela Barrett's Beauty and the Beast, or Nancy Willard and Barry Moser's version), I do recommend it to readers interested in exploring diverse interpretations of this classic tale.… (meer)

A group of foxes live on a hill and the little foxes are hungry so the big fox goes off to get the cock, the mouse, and the hen that live on the other hill. On the other hill the hen does everything in the house until the fox steals them and puts them in a sack. The fox decides to take a nap under a tree. Meanwhile, the hen cuts them out and they each put a stone in the sack and escape. The fox then wakes up and the sack is so heavy he falls down a hill in a pond and is never seen again. Then after that the cock and the mouse help the hen around the house.… (meer)