Anna Pignataro brings us another shimmering lookand- find book, this time in festive red. Best friends Princess and Fairy are very busy with Christmas--they decorate, wrap, and bake for the parade. When they are chosen to decorate the big tree in Evergreen Moor the ruby-cheeked bunny rabbits compose an enormous shopping list and then go in search of glittery goods. The reader is invited to search the pages, as the required items are embedded in the candy-coated illustrations (fantasy shopping malls with too-happy workers). The array of magical goods on the pages are a little overwhelming, and it grates against certain sensibilities. Would a young girl (of four to seven years) think that buying pretty things was the solution to being accepted? Nonetheless, at that age I believe I would have found the dazzle exciting, as though it was rendered just for me. The rhymes are sweet, and you can imagine the hours spent on the elaborate illustrations. The conclusion is about ‘believing in oneself ’, which could still possibly produce wonder in the younger readers. Overall, it is a ‘surface’ book, simply for fun-which is fine of course. Fans of other fairy and princessrelated things would get the most from it.

Angela Meyer is editorial assistant of Bookseller+Publisher

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