Title Le monde des fées Series --- Author Stella A. Caldwell Illustrator --- Publisher Broquet - 2016 First Printing Broquet - 2016 Category Reference Warnings None Main Characters --- Main Elements Faery

Rires qui tintent à l’aube, lumières clignotantes dans le pré, éclat furtif d’une aile scintillante dans la forêt. Découvre un monde magique. Crois-tu au fées?

I finally found a book on fairies that I didn't dislike, though it certainly wasn't perfect.

I'll start with the good. The content seemed pretty good, it didn't try to explain that fairies are made of electricity and then toss in some new age stuff, I mean we don't need science here, just let them be magic, we don't need to explain what they are made of, or why only some people can see them. The artwork also didn't involve extreme nudity. I mean I don't want to be a prude but it's a kid's book, that other book was just a little much.

There's some bad of course. Some of the artwork was wonderful, particulary the hand drawn stuff, but they certainly seemed to be trying to save some money by using an image provider and then just glueing some scenes together and it felt unprofessional. Not that all the photographic images were misplaced, in fact when presented with a non-magical scene if felt very appropriate. But it didn't work as well for the magical ones.

And what is it about kids non-fiction books? Can't they just provide information on an interesting topic? I've seen soooo many now that pretend to be the notebook of some person going around researching magical creatures. The first couple came off as unique, but now absolutely everyone is doing it. So out of all the text that could be dedicated to actual information, about a third to one half is spent going "I spent the night in the woods to see if I could catch a glimpse of the fairies coming out to dance. I was disappointed since I later found out it was the wrong phase of the moon" or whatever. With fake newspaper articles and little (often very repetitive) info squares scattered around. Another book had entire paragraphs about how the author/artist were going insane. Totally irrelevant stuff (and sometimes more disturbing than even the content).

Ugh, and another common thing, putting fancy script text on a textured background. I know my eyes aren't what they used to be but really, was that necessary? Just think about all those kids that have issues with sight, or contrast and can't enjoy this book since its intentionally difficult for anyone to read. I mean these books are meant for younger kids, so they have some trouble reading to start with, why make it even harder?

So I was a bit disappointed. I have some wonderful books on dragons and unicorns but found very little of the same for the fae. Perhaps because my books are from when I was a kid and we hads, you know, attention spans, and didn't need to be entertained while learning things? I dunno. And while I'd have been ok if these were just the starter books and other more informational books could be found, I was disappointed, I found nothing in the library except these books that all combined contain less information than a single Wikipedia article.

And yes, even with all those complaints, this is the one I felt that was one of the better done ones! It was apparently in English first so you can still keep an eye out for it.