THE BIG UGLY MONSTER AND THE LITTLE STONE RABBIT
By Chris Wormell
Jonathan Cape, £10.99; 36pp
ISBN 0 224 07003 7
Buy the book

IN HOLLOW LANDS
By Sophie Masson
Hodder & Stoughton, £5.99; 304pp
ISBN 0 340 85442 1

The sentimental vein in children’s literature likes to believe that infants are oblivious to ugliness or good looks. Parents, however, know the opposite to be true. Children are acutely aware of physical beauty, only learning from experience that appearances can’t be trusted. Chris Wormell’s The Big Ugly Monster and the Little Stone Rabbit tackles this head-on; so, for the older reader, does Sophie Masson’s In Hollow Lands.

Wormell is an author-illustrator who last year bounded on to a new plane with his splendid fable about friendship and fear, Two Frogs. Big Ugly Monster is also about friendship — and how lack of it can produce the consolations of art. Wormell’s Monster possesses an ugliness that combines the hairiness of the very old with the stolid shape of the toddler and is “so ugly that all the animals and birds ran and flew away as soon as they saw him . . . trees shed their leaves and even the grass turned brown and died”.

Sad and lonely, he creates a friend: a stone rabbit. The Monster’s joy at having a companion is unbounded. He sings, dances and gets older in its company, while the rabbit “never changed at all”. Then he dies, and the rabbit is left in a place that is transformed into verdant beauty, to be occasionally remarked on by people who “sometimes wondered how it had got there”. The wit and vigour of the drawings match this infinitely endearing tale about the triumph of the imagination at supplying natural deficiencies.

Sophie Masson’s In Hollow Lands also has the deceptiveness of beauty at its heart; like Tanith Lee and A. S. Byatt, she produces fiction that has a haunting quality blending realism and folk-tales. A twin brother and sister, Gromer and Tiphaine, live with their white-witch nurse, Dame Viviane, in peaceful Raguenel. On the verge of puberty, the twins are kidnapped by fairies, or korrigans. Tiphaine is changed into a monstrous half-owl, and they live enslaved until a young hedge-knight, Bertrand du Guesclin, challenges their captors with a riddle. What defeats the korrigans is not beauty, but “the part of us that is warm and messy and slow and sorrowful and loving”.

A blend of Sir Gawaine and the Loathly Lady, Breton folk-lore and medieval history (the real-life Bertrand, had a wife with reputedly supernatural gifts), what beguiles is Masson’s seductive vision of faerie worlds, and her understanding that what really matters for adults, as for children, is not looks but trust. A tale of real talent and charm, like Chris Wormell’s glorious picture book, it is challenging as well as consoling.

Read on

• Two Frogs by Chris Wormell (Red Fox) 2+; Buy the book
• Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak (Red Fox) 3+
• Sir Gawaine and the Loathly Lady by Selina Hastings (Walker) 6+
• Go Away Big Green Monster by Ed Embereley (Walker) 3+
• Patrick's Perfect Pet Walker by Annalena McAfee (Walker) 5+
• The Stolen Lake by Joan Aiken (Red Fox) 10+

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist