The Quiet Music of Gently Falling Snow: Compact Edition

by Jackie Morris (Illustrator)

Overview

A beautifully illustrated collection of interconnected folk tales by author Jackie Morris. These 12 stories are based around a series of musically-themed illustrations first created by Jackie for Help Musicians UK, a "catalyst for the imagination," as Jackie describes. Suitable for children and adults and set in a beautiful, magical world of music and majestic creatures, this is an enchanting combination of word and illustration. This new compact edition has a linen-textured hardback cover with a silver foil title and a printed paper dust jacket. A silver page marker ribbon and textured uncoated off-white paper, the same as the popular large format edition, completes this classic book format.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781912654987
Publisher:	Graffeg
Publication date:	08/01/2021
Edition description:	Compact Edition
Pages:	120
Sales rank:	350,434
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Jackie Morris is an author, artist, and illustrator who has more than 30 years’ experience writing and illustrating books. East of the Sun has been nominated fo the Carnegie Medal; Little Evie in the Wild Wood and Something About a Bear have been nominated for the Kate Greenaway Medal; and The Lost Words won the CILIP Greenaway Medal 2019. Other titles by Jackie Morris include Queen of the Sky, the Welsh-language edition of The Lost Words – Geiriau Diflanedig, Tell Me a Dragon, The Snow Leopard, and The Ice Bear.

Editorial Reviews

"The text is finely balanced between narrative flow and imaginative explorations so that parts of the stories themselves focus attention on segments of the art whilst other sections invite the inner mind’s eye to interpret matters. The reader-watcher is led through a fantasy deeper and deeper into a strikingly beautiful book suffused with the mystery and music of spellbinding art fully-realised in the tones and rhythms of the words. In summary this is a picture book for readers and picture explorers of all ages although perhaps things may be a challenge for the youngest. Whilst the style will be especially inviting to folk-tale, fantasy and musical enthusiasts within these pages are complex delights and joys for all." —School Librarian


"A land where kings and queens are chosen from among the musicians; a great white bear held captive in a tower; the tale of Moondog, the blind musician that brought music back to a land where it had been lost for many years, and whose drumming could hold back time . . . In this collection of 12 illustrated stories, music weaves with universal themes to make new magic. A collection of original folk tale-style stories inspired by her own music-themed paintings, this beautiful large hardback is an ideal gift for any Jackie Morris fan, and will appeal to adults and children alike." —BookTrust

From the Publisher

01/01/2018
Gr 7 Up—Music, snow, and well-dressed fairies figure prominently in the dozen sumptuous paintings in this oversize volume of original tales. Morris painted the scenes, one each year, as elegant Christmas cards on commission as part of a fund-raiser for England's Help Musicians UK charity. Her wintry scenes, enlarged here and positioned above the text, are fairy-tale vignettes filled with fanciful figures and structures large and small. Fay musicians ride on bears, tigers, and other animals and sometimes travel in clever carriages or air vehicles. Morris describes the newly invented stories as "a series of lullabies for grown-ups," and it does seem unlikely that children would enter into them. They're dreamy and romantic, lyrical, and also elusive in recounting the arrival of unnamed folks by sea where "there had been no music heard in the land for centuries." It takes patient reading through poetic, often vague but also imaginative tales to grasp events, characters, and shifts of sequence in the tales of loss and love and quest to restore the music. VERDICT A very attractive coffee table item.—Margaret Bush, Simmons College, Boston

School Library Journal