Smart Girls Forever
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Cover Story
This issue's cover is a photograph of Anne Frank whose diary is discussed by Michael Rosen fifty years after its first publication. Following the arrest of the Frank family and their companions, the secret annex in Amsterdam where they had been in hiding was locked up and everybody forbidden to enter it, since Jewish possessions became Nazi property and were carted away. Before this happened, the young woman, Miep Gies, who had provided those in hiding with food and who had a second key to the annex, risked herself once more by entering it. Miep retrieved Anne's diary from the devastation together with the Frank family photograph album.
Thanks to Penguin Children's Books for help in reproducing this cover.
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Send to friendSmart Girls Forever
Illustrated by Axel Scheffler
Readers who enjoyed Leeson's Smart Girls will need little persuasion to move on to its sequel. This is a collection of six folk tales, each from a different country but united by their having as heroines young resourceful women who brook little opposition in their bid to secure a place for themselves in their various worlds. Leeson takes the original stories, invests them with a contemporary, colloquial idiom (particularly evident in his dialogue) and the result is an assortment of good-humoured and lively retellings. Watch out especially for the redoubtable Oonagh, who, in a story deriving from an original by the Irish novelist William Carleton, gives the dreaded Cucullin his come-uppance, thereby ensuring peace of mind for Fin, her long-suffering husband. There is a great deal to be enjoyed here, to which Axel Scheffler's comic drawings provide a pleasant bonus.
