Snow-white

First published in 1991, this is a beautifully illustrated version of a much loved fairy-tale. Poole’s retelling is very close to Grimm, with occasional clarification or embellishment and a subtly different fate for the wicked queen. Poole retains a cool, unemotional distance between reader and story, and her words read aloud comfortably in a detached, considered style.

Barrett’s illustrations echo this restraint. They are beautifully painted, with varied page layouts, subtle colours and rich detail evoking the atmosphere perfectly. Characters rarely engage either with each other or the reader – on the cover, for example, Snow-white looks anxiously past us, out of the picture, as the stepmother puts the comb into her hair. Neither words nor pictures thus impose too much on us as our only images of the story, but rather allow us to add them to the pictures in our heads, an unusually satisfying experience.