Sharon Chmielarz

I have always had a definite weakness for a well-illustrated folk or fairy-tale, and have been known to buy the latest retelling of a story I own in numerous other editions. I have, for instance, any number of different versions of The Twelve Dancing Princesses in my personal library. A recent discussion in the Children's Books Group I moderate on a different site has prompted me to take down and reexamine the various adaptations of the legend of The Pied Piper of Hamelin in my possession, and I have discovered, to my surprise, that I haven't always been as selective as I'd like to think. I have trouble understanding, as it happens, just how I came to have this particular title on my shelves...

I found Sharon Chmielarz's prose, described on the dust-jacket as "spritely," to be rather awkward, with a segmented-feeling narrative that seemed to jump from point to point. The brightly colored illustrations by sisters Pat and Robin DeWitt had that overly cutesy, cookie-cutter aesthetic, with shimmery silver-white strands of mist to indicate that "magic!" is occurring. The overall effect was unappealing - I sense a donation to the public library book-sale coming up! - leading me to recommend that readers seek out a different retelling, perhaps the one done by Robert Holden and Drahos Zak, or that by Sara and Stephen Corrin and Errol le Cain.… (meer)