The Best Ever Nursery Rhymes and Tales
by Jonathan Langley
Illustrated by Jonathan Langley
This bumper book of over a hundred nursery rhymes and six fairy tales became a fast favourite with my four grandchildren, a boy and three girls aged 5, 3, 2 and 1. The children loved both rhymes and stories and the dynamic, detailed and often funny pictures. Baby bounced along to the rhythms.
I loved finding unfamiliar rhymes among the well-known, and thought the choice of fairytales ideal for this age-group - though the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood is very scary: he seems to leap off the page. Jonathan Langley is an award winning illustrator, less acclaimed for his writing, yet it has the same dynamism and combines the traditional and the new in a similar way. A colloquial style draws in the reader or listener, and the characters, more rounded than usual in this genre, encourage identification.
That could be traumatic as scary things happen - these are not diluted re-tellings - but the feisty heroines, Red Riding Hood, the Princess of Frog fame and the girl tricked by Rumpelstiltskin, all cope admirably, with a bit of help from supportive adults. Some boys may prefer the more masculine Three Bears, Billy Goats Gruff and Ugly Duckling, but my tribe didn't split on gender lines. I would have liked an index to help me find rhymes and stories quickly on request - or demand! - but that's a small quibble about an excellent book.
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