Sarah and Simon and No Red Paint
The cross-hatched ink and sepia-washed drawings in Edward Ardizzone's newly republished "Sarah and Simon and No Red Paint" (Godine, 48 pages, $17.95) evoke another lost era, that of Britain in the early 1960s. In a pleasantly old-fashioned story that begins with struggle and ends with redemption, we meet two children who live with their mother, their baby brother, and their father, a painter, "in a great big room called a Studio." Though loving, the family is poor, for it seems that when the painter refused to renounce art and embrace business, his rich Uncle Robert had cut him off without a farthing. Willingly, Sarah and Simon help their parents make do: They wash their father's brushes, sit for portraits, run errands. Their favorite refuge is a shabby second-hand bookshop, whose owner lets them read all they like in exchange for doing a bit of dusting. So when their father runs out of red paint--and money--just as he is completing his masterpiece, it is to the bookshop that the children run. And it is there, after overhearing their anguished conversation, that a crusty old customer decides that he will reveal himself not only as an artistic well-wisher but also as . . . Ah, but that would be telling. --Wall Street Journal--This text refers to an alternateHardcoveredition.