Cheap The Pied Piper of Hamelin (Book) (Robert Holden) Price

When it's time to literally pay the Piper for the rat eradication, however, the townspeople, unkind and ratlike in nature themselves, refuse to give the Piper his due. And so he takes the town's only real treasure, its shining-eyed girls and boys, across a crumbling, ready-to-crack bridge, and "the children left singing for a future much brighter." Zak's gorgeously painted, intricately crosshatched, deliberately unfinished illustrations render the mean, distorted faces of the townspeople as disturbing as the scuttling rats. Each scene explodes in brilliant architectural perspectives, with beams, rooftops, and arches oozing with vermin and vile villagers alike. Zak's visual world is a grotesque, unsettling mix reminiscent of the work of Pieter Bruegel and Ralph Steadman, and equally stunning. The Pied Piper of Hamelin is sure to be deliciously chilling for youngsters, as any story about mean people and rats would be, but young readers will also learn that greed and injustice are bad, and indeed, indulging in those vices may generate serious, irreversible consequences. On a lighter note, we are secretly relieved that the children are escaping the horrid town to a better place. We look forward to many, many more books from Drahos Zak. (Ages 5 and older, but more likely all ages.) --Karin Snelson