Tough ’n’ tiny
Cartoonist Kate Beaton knows how to squeeze the humour out of a situation. With her cult webcomic Hark! A Vagrant, an entire punchline can depend on a character’s facial expression. Her style translates well into picture book territory with her latest work, The Princess and the Pony by Kate Beaton (40 pp, Scholastic, $20, ages 4-7)
Princess Pinecone is the smallest in a kingdom of warriors. Wanting to be taken seriously, she requests a big, strong, fast horse for her birthday, only to be gifted with a short and chubby pony when the day arrives. Left with a dopey little guy that eats things it shouldn’t and farts too much, the princess nonetheless decides to train him for an upcoming battle. Beaton strays from the predictable underdog (underpony?) route, combining an original narrative with clever gags to make a truly one of a kind princess story. Corinne La Mer, protagonist of Tracey Baptiste’s The Jumbies (240 pp, Algonquin Young Readers, $20, ages 8-12), is another small but tough heroine. Though she has been warned against the threat of jumbies, she assumes that these demonic creatures are just stories made up by parents to keep rambunctious children in line. One day, her widowed father is charmed by a mysterious beautiful woman whom Corinne doesn’t trust. Without hav- ing time to question what is real and what is myth, Corinne is thrown into a world where things go bump in the night and strangers cannot be trusted.
Baptiste’s novel is loosely inspired by the Haitian folktale “The Magic Orange Tree.” The Jumbies is equal parts a tribute to the stories the author grew up with in her home of Trinidad (she dedicates the book to “all the children of the Caribbean”), and a new world filled with creatures of Baptiste’s own invention that will both delight and scare the crap out of kids.