Willa and Old Miss Annie
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Cover Story
This issue’s cover is from The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Poetry (cover illustration by Peter Weevers). Edited by Alison Sage (who also edited The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Literature), this sumptuous anthology is loosely divided into four sections corresponding to age starting with nursery rhymes and first poems through to poems for older children and classic poetry. Poems from such modern poets as Roger McGough, Ted Hughes, Wendy Cope and Maya Angelou sit alongside poems by Longfellow, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shelley and Shakespeare. The anthology is illustrated in full colour and black and white. Newly commissioned illustrations from, for example, Quentin Blake, Shirley Hughes and Nicola Bayley are included alongside illustrations by Randolph Caldecott, Jessie Willcox Smith and Kate Greenaway. With such a comprehensive range of poems for 2-11 year olds and upwards, this is a wonderful family book.
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Willa and Old Miss Annie
Illustrated by Kim Lewis
This collaboration between award winning author and celebrated illustrator was Highly Commended for the Carnegie Medal when it appeared in hardback in 1994. There are three linked short stories, suitable to read to infant school children or for juniors to read for themselves, in which Willa and Old Miss Annie play a part in the lives of a goat, a pony and a fox. Doherty makes a virtue of a restricted vocabulary, polishing phrases until they shine and repeating them in a way that is both hypnotic and comforting. She uses words to illuminate the magic of the stories. The pony found abandoned in the wood is identified first by a desperate misspelled plea, written in the snow, 'Helb the bony'. And boney he is, until he is nursed back to bonny health. Doherty transports these adventures into the realm of folk tale in which the older characters, viewed from the level of a small child, become larger than life; in the less attractive traits of selfishness, jealousy and deceit as well as those of friendship, warmth and understanding. Lewis's black and white illustrations, perfectly placed in the text, set the stories in a recognisable country landscape. A gem of a book.
