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Junior
Puffin Books
Hardback £7.99 ISBN: 0-141-38012-8
Reviewed by Adele Geras
[Armadillo 5.4 Winter 2003]
An author who has Jane Ray as illustrator starts out with a great advantage. The first thing you notice about this book is how very beautiful it is. It's exactly the right size and has elegant silhouettes to illustrate the stories. The cover is lovely, with a very creepy shadow falling on the face of a sleeping girl in a pretty straw hat. It's hard to imagine anyone not wanting to pick it up.
Once they have, they won't be disappointed. It's almost impossible to invent new fairy tales which have anything like the resonance and depth of the traditional ones, but Duffy has made a brilliant job of it, by marrying elements we can recognise from antiquity to her own strong poetic voice. This is characteristically unsentimental and sometimes bleak. It's often slyly humorous and uses special effects sparingly. The three stories are all good, but the best is the title story, with its unsettling notion of someone cutting off a shadow and stealing it. Children who get this in their Christmas stocking won't bother anyone for the rest of the day.