Fabulous Fairytales

The Urbana Free Library has a fabulous fairy and folk tale collection. When you get ready to pick out a costume for our Fairy Tale Ball on April 9, you'll want to look through some of our books to find the right Frog Prince costume or Cindrella ball dress or even a Gingerbread boy costume.

We also have tales from all around the world like The Dragon Prince, a Chinese Beauty and the Beast tale by well-known children's author, Laurence Yep. In this version, Seven, the youngest of the farmer's daughters, volunteers to go with the serpent that she treated kindly, when he comes forcefully seeking a bride. He carries her through the air and plunges into the sea, where she tells him how beautiful he is. He tells her she should be frightened but she replies "The eye sees what it will, but the heart sees what it should." When he hears this the dragon begins to dance and spins until he becomes a column of light, and from the light a prince emerges.

As a princess Seven wears elegant silk robes and dines on rare delicacies from gold plates, but she misses her family. The Dragon Prince gives her permission to return. She comes home at last but her older sister, Three, is jealous of her finery. She betrays Seven by disguising herself as the younger sister when it is time to return to the sea. Seven then goes to live iwth an old woman, sad that her prince has accepted her sister in her place. The Dragon Prince realizes the decption and searches far and wide for his true love. Barb L

Winter Tales

In the children's new non-fiction section you'll find a retelling of The Mitten by Jim Aylesworth. The classic tale is of a cozy mitten left in the snow where a parade of increasingly larger critters try to crawl inside to keep warm. The illustrator, Barbara McClintock, a frequent collaborator of Aylesworth, depicts the animals with humor as they squeeze and push into the mitten until at last a little mouse arrives. When the mouse finally convinces the others he is too small to make a difference, the mitten bursts. A thousand pieces of yarn fly across the pages accompanying the animals' contorted body shapes and surprised faces.

There are several other great versions of this tale. The most popular is Jan Brett's 1989 adaptaion of The Mitten featuring the animals in the center panel of the illustrations and Nicki, the child who loses and searches for the mitten, in the border panels. In this version the animals sneeze and the mitten is stretched but not broken.

The unnamed boy in The Mitten by Alvin Tresselt, published in 1964, finds only pieces of the mitten after it has burst apart. This version is well known for the illustrations by Yaroslava who incorporates authentic Ukrainian designs in the costumes of the animal characters and in the snowflakes which adorn the pages. A note attributes the adaptaion to an old Ukrainian folktale by E. Rachev which surely is the Old Man's Mitten, translated by Irina Zheleznova in 1980 with illustration by E. Rachev. The latter is an edition we don't own but can be found for interloan on our World Cat database.

Further afield is Brigitte Weninger's The Elf's Hat, a 2000 publication, in which an elf has his hat whisked off as he passes beneath a tree branch. Animals climb inside and it is a tiny flea who wiggles in at the end, sending all the other animals scurrying for fear of being bitten. The flea settles in and happily rides home with the elf when he find his hat and claps it onto his head unaware. Barb L.