Jangles A Big Fish Story by David Shannon

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a great story told by an older man to a young boy about a really big fish and the attempts by the locals to catch it. This was the original one that got away, and it had the barbed hooks attached to its lower lip to prove it. Well, this man had an interesting encounter with this fish which is harder to believe than any actual tale of the one that got away.

Gorgeously illustrated and with a steady text driving it assuredly through the deep water, this story is definitely one to encourage your children to read. It's full of inventiveness and fantasy and carries a sweet message. I recommend it.

Alice The Fairy by David Shannon

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an amazing book, amusingly drawn and nicely colored, with some great little doodles that augmented the main story, such as the 'W' in a word turned into a crown, and strawberries and cookies appearing as other letters on other pages.

Alice is actually rationalizing that she's a fairy in training in order to explain away some of the, er, incidents in her life at home, such as her ability to turn her nice white dress into a red one. Juice may have been involved. She's only a temp because you have to pass a lot of tests in order to be a permanent fairy. She can't fly very high - namely as high as her legs can hold her, but she can fly (run) really fast. She can do real magic, too - well, she made a plate of cookies disappear....

She has fairy dust that she uses to turn oatmeal into cake. It looks very much like sugar, but I'm sure it's really fairy dust! Alice manages to avoid the perils of evil which beset her in the form of broccoli. I'm not sure about the up-skirt views we got on the double page spread showing real fairies flying off to fairy school, but that's a minor issue. Overall, this book was amazing, and sly, and funny, and inventive, and I recommend it.