Customer Reviews

Dwarf Long Nose

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

From the Preface:
"Early in the nineteenth century there lived in Germany a young man named Wilhelm Hauff. Younger than Keats when he died, he left as his legacy to European Children dozens of strange and wonderful stories. ..."Dwarf Long-Nose" remains his most famous tale. It is a story as well-known to children in Germanic countries as "Snow White" or "Sleeping Beauty"; one that for a hundred and thirty years they have begged to have told to them over and over at bedtime. ..."

What a delightful book. Really---squirrels for servants and coconut slippers! In addition the illustrations by Maurice Sendak are a huge selling point. I assume this book is not as well-known because of it's awkward length. At 72 pages it is not truly a "picture book", yet the format and illustrations give the impression that it is.

I do think that if it were re-formatted it could be a hot seller like the "Whipping Boy" by Sid Fleischman.

This is definitely an under-appreciated book. Independent read grades 2-6 and stellar read-aloud for grades K-3.

I stumbled upon this story whilst reading Andrew Lang's collection "The Violet Fairy Book" and fell in love with it. Imagine how pleased I was to discover that Wilhelm Hauff's awesome story had also been translated by Doris Orgel AND illustrated by the great Maurice Sendak. Hauff died at a young age, but in Germany the tales he wrote are as famous as Grimm's. This is not only a great story, but it has the marvelous thing that the worst situations are what can makes us truly ourselves. It's cute, entertaining, and utterly imaginative at a level that not all other fairy tales are. Sendak's illustrations are of course wonderful as always. This is a little-known tale on our continent and I really do not think it should be that way.