Child of the May
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Cover Story
This issue’s cover is from The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Poetry (cover illustration by Peter Weevers). Edited by Alison Sage (who also edited The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Literature), this sumptuous anthology is loosely divided into four sections corresponding to age starting with nursery rhymes and first poems through to poems for older children and classic poetry. Poems from such modern poets as Roger McGough, Ted Hughes, Wendy Cope and Maya Angelou sit alongside poems by Longfellow, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shelley and Shakespeare. The anthology is illustrated in full colour and black and white. Newly commissioned illustrations from, for example, Quentin Blake, Shirley Hughes and Nicola Bayley are included alongside illustrations by Randolph Caldecott, Jessie Willcox Smith and Kate Greenaway. With such a comprehensive range of poems for 2-11 year olds and upwards, this is a wonderful family book.
Child of the May
The usual focus on the male camaraderie of Robin Hood's escapades in Sherwood Forest is abandoned here - with a frequent sense of glee and mischief - in favour of a story which sets out to demonstrate that women too had a significant contribution to make to the struggles between 'outlaw' and despot. At the centre of these entertaining episodes is a feisty 15-year-old, Magda, determined to have her share of the action and, in particular, to revenge her mother's killing. Translating this determination into practice involves feats of high risk and danger and challengingly demands from the reader a constant re-examination of male and female roles, not least in the tantalisingly tetchy 'background' relationship portrayed between Marian and Robin himself.