Previously

by Allan Ahlberg, Bruce Ingman (Illustrator)

Overview

"Read this book aloud so that youngsters can chime in. . . . Children will delight in this energetic, amusing, and very approachable tale." —School Library Journal

Do you know what Jack and Jill were arguing about before they went up the hill? And what happened before that? Every story, every person, and every thing started somewhere. Author Allan Ahlberg and illustrator Bruce Ingman, the whimsical team behind The Runaway Dinner and The Pencil, reverse direction in this clever pastiche of fairy tales in which everyone lives happily ever . . . before.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780763653040
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	04/12/2011
Pages:	32
Product dimensions:	10.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.20(d)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Allan Ahlberg (1938–2025) is the acclaimed author of many books for children, including Under the Table, Previously, and The Pencil, all illustrated by Bruce Ingman. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called The Pencil “clever and suspenseful . . . a surefire delight.” His best-known series, The Jolly Postman and its sequels, has sold millions of copies worldwide.

Bruce Ingman is an award-winning children’s book illustrator who illustrated The Runaway Dinner by Allan Ahlberg and Boing! by Sean Taylor. He lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

A witty, stylish riff on favorite fairy tales.
—FamilyFun

Children will delight in this energetic, amusing, and very approachable tale.
—School Library Journal

From the Publisher

Along the same lines as David LaRochelle and Richard Egielski's The End (February 2007), but using more predictable elements, Ahlberg and Ingman present a set of linked tales in rewind mode. Goldilocks arrives home "all bothered and hot." Why? Because previously she had run through the forest, having climbed out of somebody's window in the wake of being caught sleeping in someone's bed, etc. Even before that, she had bumped into a lad named Jack with a hen under his arm . . . and so on, through Jack and Jill, the Frog Prince, Cinderella and others-and yet further back, to when all the characters were babies and, even further, the dark woods were seedlings "in the sun and the wind and the rain / under the endless sky, once upon a time. Previously." In Ingman's thickly brushed cartoons, small figures in contemporary dress dash through rolling fields and thick forest before regressing to a spread of diaper-clad infants, then giving way to open, almost abstract landscape. The title word's repetition creates a verbal pattern that comes out more clearly when spoken aloud, but even solitary young readers will follow the plot easily-in either direction. (Picture book. 6-8)

Kirkus Reviews