THE LADY AND THE LION

Long’s romantic, extravagantly detailed paintings provide showstopping accompaniment to this lightly reworked Grimm Brothers version of “East of the Sun and West of the Moon.” The course of true love runs anything but smooth for a merchant’s younger daughter when she meets a prince under a complex enchantment. First, he’s a lion by day, then he's transformed into a dove that she must seek for seven years, and then, just as they’re reunited, the enchantress behind it all snatches him away to a very remote castle. With help from several magical talismans and sympathetic Powers, the heroine rescues him at last, while the enraged enchantress falls from her high window in the ensuing escape. In a style that evokes both Persian miniatures and the pre-Raphaelite painters, Long frames pale, graceful figures clad in elaborately patterned silks and velvets within swirls of vines, flowers, waves, clouds, and stone arches. Readers who delight in the art of Kinuko Craft, Marianna Mayer, and like romantics will be dazzled. (Picture book/folktale. 10-13)