ANNOTATION

A young girl feels a pea through twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds and proves that she is a real princess.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A young girl feels a pea through twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds and proves that she is a real princess.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Intricate patterns and dreamy pastel hues mark Duntze's luxuriant ilustrations for this classic tale. Ages 3-6. (May)

School Library Journal

K-Gr 3 This story of a princess chosen for her feelings rather than her beauty de serves retelling, and Bell's translation is smooth and fast-moving. All the charac ters in Tharlet's gentle gray and mauve pictures, even the ``old'' King and Queen, appear to be children in 18th-Century fan cy dress. Round-headed and with sharply- drawn cartoon faces, their short stature is exaggerated by the interesting, rafter-lev el perspective. The soft watercolors are particularly suitable for a story about re fined sensibility, as they create both the misty air and the comfortably elegant manor and furnishings of a small northern kingdom. Only the incongruity between the silly comic faces and the romantic set tings is disconcerting. Patricia Dooley, formerly at Drexel University, Philadel phia