#439 of 1001 · October 13, 2021

As you read Anthea Bell’s translation of the Brothers Grimm tale The Six Servants, illustrated by Sergei Goloshapov. A wicked enchantress queen assigns impossible tasks to any suitors who seek the hand of her beautiful daughter in marriage; when the men inevitably fail, she gleefully beheads them. One young prince decides to try his luck and sets out for the queen’s city. On his way, he encounters an enormous man with an insatiable appetite, a man with giant ears that allow him to hear anything in the world, a man with inordinately long legs, a man whose powerful stare can shatter anything before him, a man who experiences heat as cold and cold as heat, and a man with sharp eyes that can see across huge distances. Each of these six men agrees to be the prince’s servant, and each has a crucial role to play in fulfilling the evil queen’s three befuddling tasks: retrieve a ring she once dropped in the Red Sea, consume three hundred oxen (skin, bone, hair, horns, and all) and three hundred barrels of wine in a night, and keep watch over the princess despite a sleeping spell. Bell sticks closely to the Grimms’ language and phrasing, while Goloshapov represents the marvelous servants’ anatomic irregularities with charmingly grotesque distortion in his watercolor, gouache, and ink art. #queen #princess #prince #ring #wine #magic #book #books #childrensbooks #beautifulbook #beautifulbooks #beautifulbookcovers #picturebook #picturebooks #picturebookillustration #picturebookart #childrensbookillustration #childrensliterature #illustration #kidlit #kidsbooks #bookworm #booklover #booklovers #bibliophile #bookstagram #bookstagrammer #bookstagrammers #instabook #instabooks