'The Princess and the Peas' by Caryl Hart & Sarah Warburton
Lily-Rose May is a sweet little girl who lives with her daddy in a beautiful wood full of butterflies, birds and bunny rabbits. Lily-Rose is perfect in every way until... her dad tries to feed her peas. Disaster strikes, Lily-Rose can't stand them (even when whizzed up into smoothies or baked in biscuits and cakes). Dad is so perturbed he calls for the doctor, who diagnoses a severe case of Princess-itis and packs Lily-Rose off to live at the local castle. Lily-Rose loves living in the lap of royal luxury - wearing fabulous dresses and shoes, reading her own library of books and playing with more teddies than you can shake a stick at - but it all goes to pot when she sits down to dinner that night, as she is presented with a dinner far more revolting than peas! Things go from bad to worse after that with princess training aplenty; learning speeches, lessons in smiling, non-stop waving and a host of other trials. Perhaps a pea-free life isn't quite as good as it sounds...
Medium Hingleberry and I LOVED this book! The sing-y-song rhyme is super and the illustrations are just as delicious as the peas (with a clever opportunity to discuss where Mum might be provided by the illustrations). There is lots of gentle humour and a clever reference to the original fairy tale, as told by the doctor. Afterwards, we talked for ages about rhyming words and Medium Hingleberry also bought up the subject of why it was good to be happy with what you have at home (even though we thought that being a princess really would be rather marvellous!), which is what I'd hoped she would get from it, well done Caryl Hart! The added bonus came with a new Nosy Crow speciality - 'Stories Aloud' - where, with a quick flick of the phone, we were teated to a lovely retelling of the story by a child.
Medium Hingleberry "I won't not never eat my peas mummy because I don't want cabbages in soup. My best was when Lily-Rose could have all the shoes and all the dresses in the world but went home with Daddy to eat her peas." i'll remind her of that next time we have peas for tea...
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!
For more info about 'Stories Aloud' and Nosy Crow's other fantastic offerings, visit them here
You can buy 'The Princess and the Peas' here
more Bookywookydoodah Friday next week x
