Miles Kelly

“Big Book of Princess Stories”

The “Big Book of Princess Stories” is a collection of fairy tale stories about the princesses Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and The Princess and the Pea. I liked this book for two reasons. I liked the illustrations and the style of writing. These two elements make it accessible for early readers.
The illustrations of this book enhance the story in that that the story could be told with just the pictures. It is important for a picture to have illustrations that tell the story just as well as the words do. For example, for the Cinderella story, there were pictures of Cinderella being sad while her sister laughed in the background. It had a picture of Cinderella in the pumpkin carriage and her fairy godmother. It also had pictures of Cinderella at the ball dancing with the prince and then the prince trying to find Cinderella. A reader could retell the story just from the information they got from the pictures. The drawings are also simple enough for young readers to understand, yet it is realistic enough to keep them engaged.
The style of writing was also simple and some of the words in the sentences were emphasized by capitalizing the words and by making them a different font. This will also keep young readers interested and will allow them to follow along. For example, in the Sleeping Beauty story, one of the sentences said “The queen collapsed into the king’s arms in shock, but then the last fairy stepped forwards, ‘WAIT!’ she said. Having the capital letters grabs the reader’s attention.
The common theme in all of these stories is kindness because all of the princesses show kindness and therefore have a happy ending.… (more)

I really like this book for a couple of reasons. First of all, the writing is engaging, organized and paced well for children. All the information is broken down into small, easy to comprehend chunks. The book also has a great deal of information for a small encyclopedia, on many many topics involving space. Secondly, I really liked all the pictures and illustrations. They really enhance the meaning of the text because all the pictures help to further explain the text. This makes it easier to understand for younger readers. The big idea of this book is to provide information about topics involving space, mainly to younger readers.… (more)