#979 of 1001 · April 6, 2023

Arriving in strange lands, we must keep our wits about us. Here, for your comfort and pleasure, is daughter-and-mother team Marie Charlotte and Kinuko Y. Craft’s sumptuous retelling of the tale of Cupid and Psyche. The story opens in Ancient Greece, with a king, a queen, and their three daughters. The youngest princess, Psyche, is so beautiful that people begin to suspect she is an incarnation of Venus. When the goddess herself hears this rumor, she is deeply offended. She commands her son Cupid to avenge the insult, but Cupid accidentally scratches himself with his own arrow of desire and falls in love with Psyche. Later, on the advice of the Oracle of Delphi, Psyche goes to the top of a mountain and is wed to a mysterious suitor who will not reveal his face. Her sisters eventually convince her to look at him as he sleeps. To her surprise, it is Cupid himself. The god flees, and Venus sets Psyche three tasks to win back her husband: sorting a mound of grain into separate piles, gathering golden fleece from a flock of fiery rams, and retrieving a box from Proserpina, queen of the underworld. Once Psyche completes these errands, she is made immortal and she a Cupid are never again parted. Marie Craft’s compelling language and Kinuko Craft’s extraordinary oil-over-watercolor paintings combine for a magnificent whole. A note for folklore enthusiasts: The myth of Cupid and Psyche was originally recorded in The Golden Ass, a book written by the Roman author Apuleius in the first century of the common era, making it not only the earliest printed variant of the Search for the Lost Husband tale type but also one of the older surviving pieces of folklore in the western world. #god #goddess #mountain #palace #grain #fleece #death #love #magic #book #books #childrensbooks #picturebook #picturebooks #picturebookillustration #picturebookart #childrensbookillustration #childrensliterature #illustration #kidlit #kidsbooks #bookworm #booklover #booklovers #bibliophile #bookstagram #bookstagrammer #bookstagrammers #instabook #instabooks