An Undone Fairy Tale
Jan. 30th, 2012 02:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
library_mamaI found this one using a keyword search looking for books similar to Once Upon a Cool Motorcycle Dude. My mother laughed so hard she almost couldn’t finish reading it to my son, who then took it in to school for his class. It got a 100% thumbs-up rating from them – not even a single thumbs sideways.
An Undone Fairy Tale by Ian Lendler. Illustrated by Whitney Martin. Once upon a time, a beautiful princess was trapped in a tower. Her wicked stepfather, the king, locked her away so that she could bake her famous pies only for him. “Not even her mother could help her.” Naturally, princes and knights came to rescue her, but they all failed the three impossible tasks her stepfather set for them. Up until this point, straightforward fairy tale, told in a fancy typeface. And then, things start to go wrong. The brave, famous Sir Wilbur arrives to meet the king – and finds that he is wearing a doughnut instead of a crown. This, we are informed in plain sans-serif typeface, is because we, the readers, are reading too quickly, and the artist didn’t have time to fill in a proper crown. The artist is right there, in fact, hanging from some scaffolding trying to paint the wall behind the king. Now we are begged not to turn the page – the artist hasn’t gotten his delivery of horses or armor yet. But of course we do, and in the subsequent pages, poor Sir Wilbur is forced to fight a dragon which turns out to be a pretzel, riding on a fish and wearing a pink tutu. Things get more and more out of hand, with the drawings looking less and less polished, until the princess takes matters into her own hands, for a very silly happily-ever-after ending.
Cross-posted to http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org and http://sapphireone.livejournal.com .
An Undone Fairy Tale by Ian Lendler. Illustrated by Whitney Martin. Once upon a time, a beautiful princess was trapped in a tower. Her wicked stepfather, the king, locked her away so that she could bake her famous pies only for him. “Not even her mother could help her.” Naturally, princes and knights came to rescue her, but they all failed the three impossible tasks her stepfather set for them. Up until this point, straightforward fairy tale, told in a fancy typeface. And then, things start to go wrong. The brave, famous Sir Wilbur arrives to meet the king – and finds that he is wearing a doughnut instead of a crown. This, we are informed in plain sans-serif typeface, is because we, the readers, are reading too quickly, and the artist didn’t have time to fill in a proper crown. The artist is right there, in fact, hanging from some scaffolding trying to paint the wall behind the king. Now we are begged not to turn the page – the artist hasn’t gotten his delivery of horses or armor yet. But of course we do, and in the subsequent pages, poor Sir Wilbur is forced to fight a dragon which turns out to be a pretzel, riding on a fish and wearing a pink tutu. Things get more and more out of hand, with the drawings looking less and less polished, until the princess takes matters into her own hands, for a very silly happily-ever-after ending. Cross-posted to http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org and http://sapphireone.livejournal.com .
