Reviewing "The Little Book-Room" by Eleanor Farjeon

I really liked Eleanor Farjeon’s Humming Bird, a novel geared toward adults. In a completely different way, I also like The Little Book Room, a collection of Farjeon’s short stories for children—most of which are fairy tales.

Like any collection of short stories, some chapters are better than others. Some were sort of sad, like The Miracle of the Poor Island, which reminded me of Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Others (and these were the ones I preferred) were witty and tongue-in-cheek, similar to E. Nesbit’s Melisande. Here are my three favorite entries: 

I enjoyed The King’s Daughter Cries for the Moon because it is set in the sort of self-contained Fairy Tale kingdom. When the King’s Daughter cries because she wants the moon and hasn’t gotten it, it sets off a chain reaction that snowballs out of control, leading to all sorts of people (and elements of nature) going on strike. What results is a domino effect of hilarity.

The Little Dressmaker is very Cinderella-like. It’s about a dressmaker’s assistant who is brilliant at her job, so much so in fact that her boss the dressmaker makes her do all the work and takes all the credit. When the local Queen decides that her nephew and heir the Prince should get married, she schedules a four-night Ball for him to decide who to marry. Of course all the eligible ladies want to look their best, so they go to the dressmaker (who in turn goes to the Little Dressmaker) to get the most gorgeous gowns in order to win the Prince’s heart. I won’t go into any more detail lest I spoil the ending, which is quite romantic—and a bit unconventional.

Lastly, The Connemara Donkey is not as much a Fairy Tale as a story about a Danny O’Toole, a boy who believes in fairy tales. More importantly, Danny believes his father, a man prone to exaggeration and embellishment of the truth. Things become serious when Danny happens to latch onto one of his dad’s tall tales, and uses it to assert his importance at school. Of course the bullies and skeptics call Danny a fraud, but Danny’s (somewhat misplaced) trust in his dad is immovable, putting him in a precarious position as the truth inevitably begins to reveal itself.