Blair the Winner!
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Cover Story
This issue’s cover is from the gift edition of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory illustrated by Quentin Blake and with design and typography by Peter Campbell. The successful collaboration between Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake has played an important part in the popularity of Dahl’s work over the last fifteen years. Blake’s unmistakable artwork truly complements Dahl’s writing. His economical, amiable, illustrative style balances out Dahl’s often expansive language. And the liveliness, humour and pathos of the drawings offer a softer side to Dahl’s sometimes gloriously grotesque, sometimes cruel descriptions of his characters.
Thanks to Penguin Children’s Books for their help in producing this July cover which commemorates the thirty years anniversary of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s first UK publication.
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Blair the Winner!
Illustrated by Ken Cox
This quartet of lively little stories involves Blair's younger brother Willis, older sister Melissa, Mum, Dad and Granny. Within the fairly limited confines of this particular kind of publishing - 'stories for building confidence' as the blurb describes them - Breslin succeeds in conveying the boisterousness of a young boy determined to establish his own place within his family, an aspiration in which a notably supportive Granny has a significant role to play. The move in the stories is always from chaos to order, from (mild) discord to harmony - with a good deal of hilarity to be encountered en route. Refreshingly, grownups are shown to have their fallibilities and their shortsightedness; part of the fun is young Blair's understanding that this is so. Cox's illustrations Capture the exuberance of the stories and their young hero's energy.
