Fairy Dreams

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This unsuccessful hybrid of I Spy and computer game fantasy will likely leave readers confused and frustrated. While Isobel sleeps, butterfly-winged fairies with pointed ears steal 12 treasures from her room, and readers are asked to find them. An opening poem lists the items ("Her ball, her fan, her pot for tea,/ The egg she found beside a tree," etc.) but the order of the poem's list does not correspond to the order of the items to be found in subsequent pages. Instead, a four-line rhyming stanza on each spread provides the clue for the lost item. Unfortunately, the fuzzy, repeated details in McLean-Carr's computer-generated artwork hampers the search. Isobel's purple fan, for instance, is nearly identical to the many fan-shaped purple flowers hidden in the grass. Endpapers feature the 12 named fairies with their stolen treasures, but even these clues sometimes obscure the search: the fairy Pamble holds two shells on the endpaper, and pinpointing which shell the artist wants readers to find at the seaside panorama is perplexing. To further extend the game, the paper-over-board book ends with Isobel awakening and finding 12 gifts from the fairies so that readers with any patience left can begin a second search. Ages 5-up. (Jan.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Gr 2-3-Only the most ardent admirers of fairy worlds will find pleasure in McLean-Carr's seek-and-find book. Computer-designed graphics, using elements like digital airbrush and scanned textures for illustrations, borders, and spot art, exhibit a prefab rather than mystic look. The challenge of the opening poem is to find the dozen endpaper fairies with their corresponding treasures among the following luminous and busy vignettes of pixies, elves, mermaids, and the like. The double-page spreads present two-line poems bearing little relation to the item at hand. Certain treasures are too obvious, others too elusive. The final page offers more "gifts" to hunt when revisiting the pages. This browsing book is uneven in quality and not entertaining beyond its unique appearance.-Gay Lynn Van Vleck, Henrico County Library, Glen Allen, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.