Illustrated Tales of Dwarfs, Gnomes, and Fairy Folk — Review

Thought for the Day:

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.”
~ Aristotle ~

Gifts for My Writer Friends:

Have you ever thought about when is the best time to submit your book to agents and publishers? HERE is Bookfox with The Best and Worst Months to Submit to Agents & Publishers. Something to think about.

Writers.com has a good article HERE all about Literary Devices with lots of good examples.

Since this is an MMGM post, I presume most of my writing readers are working on middle-grade books. HERE is a great article from Writer’s Digest by Fleur Bradley (author of Midnight at the Barkley Hotel, which I loved!) with 7 Tips for Developing a Compelling Middle-Grade Fiction Premise.

I didn’t mean to disappear on all of you for the last two weeks, but it couldn’t be helped. Two weeks ago, I was feeling very bad. I had an appointment with the rheumatologist and told her I didn’t think the medicine was working. She immediately felt it was something else and sent me to the ER for a bunch of tests. I was admitted in the middle of the night. They discovered I had some weird pneumonia. After a few days, they landed on a treatment plan and sent me home. I immediately began to feel worse, and after three days, I was back in the ER, admitted again. It turned out I had a bad reaction to the medicine and it actually sent me into renal failure. Holy smoke, I was so sick! I was too sick to read. And that included keeping up with email and blogs, so I apologize for not reading all your good work. I came home from the hospital a couple days ago and am on the mend. It has been a journey.

I’d like to talk about a really beautiful book this week. Sometimes I can’t resist a book simply for its pure beauty. But this one has the added benefit of being filled with fairy tales, which I love. When I saw the Illustrated Tales of Dwarfs, Gnomes, and Fairy Folk illustrated by Daniela Drescher show up on the review list for the Seattle Book Review, I grabbed it. Here is the review I wrote for SBR.

Fairy tales have never gone out of style, and they likely never will. This collection is bound to become a family favorite. There are twenty-two stories, all having a wonderfully old-fashioned feel to the writing that will transport readers to a different time and place. Some of these stories will be very familiar, but many are not well known and will be new to young readers and perhaps even their parents.

While the writing is at a level many elementary school readers can read on their own, the stories are short and make good read-aloud works for younger kids. But the real star of this book is the gorgeous, full-color illustrations that populate almost every page. It isn’t often that only the illustrator’s name appears on the cover and that her name is listed before the writer on the title page. This clearly is a statement that the publisher recognizes that the illustrations are the main selling point for this book.

This book is sure to become a favorite and will likely become worn as youngsters want to read it over and over, especially spending time looking at the beautiful illustrations and searching for all the wonderful details.

Please don’t forget to check for other Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday posts at Greg Pattridge’s blog HERE.