Kirsty Knows Best - Softcover

PreSchool-Grade 2 Kirsty is an ordinary little girl who creates an extraordinary fantasy life in order to transcend the humdrum routines, annoyances, and disappointments of everyday life. Spanning only a single morning, the story opens with ``Princess Kirsty'' leisurely planning her royal activities in the comfort of an Elizabethan four-poster bed. Yanked abruptly into reality by her mother's shrill voice demanding that she stop daydreaming and eat her breakfast, Kirsty imaginatively changes her scolding mother, her unemployed father, the soiled breakfast table, and her uneaten cereal. At school Nora, the nagging bully, is turned into a hideous green frog who expands until she explodes; and Kirsty herself becomes a butterfly. Just as Kirsty carefully recognizes and controls the boundaries between fantasy and reality, McAfee and Browne brilliantly differentiate and elaborate upon the theme of metamorphosis. Each of Kirsty's fantasies is written in rhyme, adorned with an illuminated capital letter and illustrated with a full-page, intricately detailed, realistic watercolor, which fleshes out the fantasy. In contrast, McAfee writes the realistic scenes in prose, while Browne's illustrations become smaller, more subdued, and filled with the mundane details of Kirsty's reality. An insightful, imaginative, and sophisticated window into a child's imagination that offers children both power and permission to dream while rooting themselves safely in reality.Pamela Miller Ness, The Fenn School, Concord, Mass.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Kirsty's inveterate daydreaming affords her respite from the circumstances of her daily life: a shrill-voiced mother with a menial job, an unemployed father and the merciless taunts of the class bully Nora. Kirsty imagines herself a princess, her mother a famous singer, her father a brilliant scientist; and she fantasizes that Nora puffs up into a frog and explodes, while Kirsty, as a butterfly, sails above. By itself, McAfee's text is solid but unremarkable fare. But with Browne's artistry, the book soars. Visually contrasting the drabness of Kirsty's everyday existence with the brilliance of her fantasies is only the beginning. As Kirsty begins to daydream, her classroom takes on nuances of a fantastical place; the distinctive shape of Nora's pigtailed head is suggested in many scenes, illustrating Kirsty's preoccupation with her. It is the very subtlety of such details, and Browne's concomitant avoidance of the obvious or heavyhanded, that renders this an unusually provocative examination of the power of imagination to transform reality and of the frequent blurring of the two. Ages 7-11.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.