One-Eye! Two-Eyes! Three-Eyes!: A Very Grimm Fairy Tale (review)

In this loose retelling of the Grimm Brothers' "One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and Three-Eyes," the eldest of three sisters has one eye, the second has three, but "the youngest sister was different. Her name was Two-Eyes, and that's just what she had." The older sisters are ashamed of their two-eyed sister and subsequently treat her very badly, dressing her in rags and only feeding her leftovers. Through a series of brushes with a fairy-godmother-esque old woman, Two-Eyes is able to overcome most of her troubles, having received one spell that provides food, another that puts her one-eyed sister to sleep, and still another that makes magic apples fall into her hand. When a knight in armor rides up the lane requesting an apple, only Two-Eyes is able to satisfy his craving. He pulls back his visor to reveal—you guessed it—two eyes, and the knight and Two-Eyes return to his castle for happily ever after. The easy patterning and amusing characters in this adaptation folktale make it a good choice for a readaloud; the various chants add cadence to the already jaunty text and the obvious villains are so despicable as to be funny. Shepard's retelling is so conceptually confusing, however, that its point is unclear: in the Grimms' tale, the sisters (and their mother) despise Two-Eyes because her binocularity makes her common and ordinary, but here she's mistreated by her sisters because she is different; since she's only accepted by the knight and all the two-eyed people of his kingdom, the lesson would seem to be that difference is indeed a problem and the evil sisters had a point. Moral implications aside, young listeners can never have enough stories of evil sisters going down, and the entertaining contemporary twists in Clement's watercolor-and-pencil illustrations (Two-Eyes heats her leftovers in a microwave and the old woman carries a box of tissues) are great fun to find. An adapter's note offers no explanation for his alterations, but it provides musical notation for the sleeping chant and notes its basis in Grimm.