Fairy Dreams
Carol McLean-Carr
Scholastic
Fiction, CH Fantasy/Gamebooks/Picture Books/Poetry
Themes: Cross-Genre, Faeries
*****
Description
As Isobel sleeps, twelve fairies sneak into her room and borrow twelve things from her for the Fairy Ball, but manage to lose them along the way. In the morning, they replace the lost toys with magical gifts they picked up in their journey. Can you find Isobel's toys, and where the fairies found their gifts?
Review
Even if there hadn't been a searching-element to this book, and even without the 20% Barnes & Noble discount, I would've quite happily paid the full cover price for the illustrations alone. The rhyming story is sweet, but not sappy, a suitable supplement to the stunningly beautiful and inspiring pictures. The author apparently used Photoshop, Fractal Painter, and her IBM (not a Mac, like most computer graphics people seem to use) in combination with her own drawings to make these pictures, but you really have to search to find where the computer work ends and the drawn sections begin. If I seem to be gushing about the pictures, it's because I'm still blown away by them. Truly enchanting - and, at only 11 US dollars, much more affordable than many other hardcover picture books I've added to my collection.