However, new elements, such as the gender change and the brothers' motivation for secrecy, fit neatly. Few elements of the Grimm tale remain, except the worn shoes, the illicit dancing, the outsider who solves the mystery, and the cloak of invisibility. Text is boxed with old frayed sneakers and laces. The strutting, high-stepping brothers are full of individuality, attitude, and movement. Nelson's pencil drawings were photocopied and then painted in oils, producing a fine line, minutely detailed characters and settings, and expressively lit coloration. The setting for Allen's fresh imagining is 'a little village called Harlem.' Her hip text is given spark and personality through the use of contemporary dialect: Sunday's cookies ' were jump up and down, slap yo' own self in the face good!' The humor of the story is heightened by the artwork. Only when the ingenious housekeeper, Sunday, attempts to reveal the brothers' secret is Reverend Knight's own predilection for dancing disclosed and the family-along with the bewitching Sunday-reconciled. Believing that their father would not approve of their clandestine dancing at the Big Band Ballroom, the 12 boys refuse to confide in him. (Picture book.Kindergarten-Grade 4-A spin-off of the Grimm tale, 'The Twelve Dancing Princesses,' this is the story of Preacher Knight and his attempts to solve the mystery of the worn-out sneakers he finds in his sons' room each morning.

An author’s note on the history of matryoshkas is a welcome touch.

Brown’s atmospheric but docile watercolors often view the matryoshka dolls from a distance, furthering the sense that the story is about events surrounding the dolls, instead of the dolls themselves. In the meantime, a young girl who has bought the rest of the set on sale charmingly tucks a little wad of cotton into the next-to-smallest doll so she won’t feel empty. It is an odyssey in which she has absolutely no active part, nor does she have reactions, for all she possesses is a blank matryoshka face. The outer doll, Anna, has been instructed by the maker to watch over her siblings-“Keep your sisters safe inside you”-but there is nothing she can do when the smallest doll, Nina, is accidentally brushed off the counter and unceremoniously kicked out the door. A set of the nesting dolls is carved in a Russian village and then sent to a toy shop in America. PLB 0-7868-2125-6 As is true for Pam Conrad’s Tub People, the events in a matryoshka doll’s life depend on external manipulations and circumstances in this case, it makes the story of a perilous journey fall somewhat flat.

Brothers of the knight debbie allen