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  • Ten Books
  • Barbara Rosen (bio)
Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs: A Tale from the Brothers Grimm. Translated by Randall Jarrell. Illustrated by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $5.95).
The Fantastic Story of King Brioche the First by Anne Jenny. Illustrated by Jocelyn Pache. Ages 5 to 8. (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., $4. 25).
Sati the Rastifarian by Edgar White. Illustrated by Dindga McCannon. Ages 6 to 9. (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., $3.95).
Away Went the Balloons by Carolyn Haywood. Illustrated by the Author. Ages 6 to 10. (William Morrow & Company, Inc., $4.75).
Last Horse on the Sands by Arthur Catherall. Illustrated by David Farris. Ages 8 to 12. (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., $4.25).
Red Rock over the River by Patricia Beatty. Ages 10 to 14. (William Morrow & Company, Inc., $5.50).
Jockin the Jester by Ursula Moray Williams. (Thomas Nelson, Inc., $5.95).
Devil's Nob by Philip Turner. (Thomas Nelson, Inc., $4.95).
The Curse of Laguna Grande by S. R. Van Iterson. Translated by Hilda van Stockum. (William Morrow & Company, Inc., $4.95).
The War on William Street by Reginald Ottley. (Thomas Nelson, Inc., $4.95).

Books designed for teenagers become more sombrely adult every year, thereby perhaps contributing to the eventual disappearance of the market. It would be [End Page 223] interesting to know how many teenagers who read for pleasure already skip straight from Lloyd Alexander to Tolkien, from horse and nursing stories to pulp romance, from Lois Lenski to Brautigan and Vonnegut.

Books for small children are still geared to the uncertain tastes of the parents who buy them; it is the pictures, we are told, rather than the few lines of print that sell the book. In the small amount of space allowed for print, the author's chief concern is not to bore tots brought up on the Electric Company; and even those books which try to extend the material in accordance with Women's Lib. or Third World concerns seldom escape the spoon-feed syndrome—dollop after dollop of incident ladled into a passive open mouth—pabulum spiced with paint.

For teenagers, a story is a way of extending and translating experience they already have; for toddlers, a story is life-experience itself, and they want to know where they begin and end. This is why the traditional fairy tales (however bowdlerised and Disneyed up) provide satisfaction. Everything has a cause and effect, with a comfortable explanation called magic for anything which a child doesn't understand, or anything which has beginnings outside the frame of the story.

But too often these stories appear only in collections or large anthologies, daunting to a beginning reader. A recognition of the need for new formats in the re-issue of classics must lie behind the latest edition of Snow-White. A Caldecott Honor Book, it is outstanding on many counts.

Product-testers Seven and Eleven were united in their praise of it. They took turns in reading the text aloud and studied the pictures together, exclaiming over and over at the details that gradually revealed themselves. (It seems to me that even much younger children enjoy sorting out a detailed, traditional illustration, long after they grow bored by splashy, colorful pictures that make their point at the first glance).

The illustrations to Snow-White depart from the usual format of children's books (picture accompanying text on the same or an opposing page); all the pictures but the first are double page spreads linked in subject to the last paragraph of the page before. Yet each picture is valid in its own terms, extending the world of the story by symbol and suggestion. For instance, when the wicked Queen laces Snow-White so tightly that she falls unconscious, the incident is shown as an insert in a landscape like an old map, stiff with trees, mountains and castles, dotted with overscaled knights and hunters, and made sinister by a crimson Celtic dragon capturing a plump white rabbit.

The printed pages, themselves beautiful, are set out with a variable number of lines, enticingly paragraphed and broken by conversations and verse. Randall Jarrell's traslation is simple and straightforward...

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