Oxford Winnie Flies Again

Winnie the Witch loves travelling by broomstick. Sadly, when the sky starts filling up with all kinds of flying machines, Winnie and Wilbur have a few mid-air crashes and a few more near misses. Winnie tries a little magic to turn her broomstick into a bicycle, a skateboard, even a horse. But the accidents still happen. Perhaps Winnie needs to look no further than the end of her nose for an answer to her problems ... Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Winnie the witch travels on a broomstick equipped with a bike seat, stirrups and ornate Victorian headlamps in this campy tale from a British team. She loves cruising at high altitudes, "but, just lately, the sky had become rather crowded." After close calls with a helicopter and a brick tower, above a landscape of quaint English houses and labyrinthine roadways, Winnie sidelines her broom. Yet even on a bike or a horse, Winnie is accident-prone. She trips over her shoes' pointy toes and bends her sorcerer's tall hat, and her black cat, Wilbur, has a bandaged tail to show for it. Paul conveys Winnie's misadventures through line drawings that seem to grow more detailed with rereadings. His bristly-haired, pie-eyed and beaky-nosed characters nod to Ronald Searle's antic caricatures. His fantasy landscapes--often drawn from a vertiginous bird's-eye view, a subterranean angle or with a cutaway view--include skyscrapers, castles, baroque machinery and a stray dragon or two. The drawings work overtime to compensate for Thomas's lackluster plot, which posits Winnie as the Mr. Magoo of the witch world: a pair of glasses restores the heroine's barnstorming skills. Even if the conclusion can be seen coming from a mile away, the elaborate illustrations are full of surprises. Ages 4-8. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 3-The skies are not friendly for Winnie the Witch, who flies on her broomstick into airplanes, hang gliders, and buildings. Determined to find a safer means of travel, she turns her broom into a bike (but a pond gets in her way), a skateboard (and collides with an ice-cream truck), and a horse (where did that low branch come from?). When she decides that walking is the only way to go, she falls down an open manhole. Exhausted, she wanders into a shop for some tea, only to discover that it is an eyeglass shop. Lucky for her, the saleslady sees her problem immediately and sells her a pair of spectacles. Paul's busy cartoons are packed with visual jokes, from the stirrups on Winnie's broomstick to the eye-patched pirate shopping for sunglasses with only one dark lens. The design is also clever: two illustrations of a tall tower require turning the book sideways, and a cross-section scene shows the street above and the tunnels below when Winnie falls through the manhole. Though Amy Hest's Baby Duck and the Bad Eyeglasses (Candlewick, 1996) is an excellent choice on this subject, Thomas's tongue-in-cheek humor will appeal to a wider audience.-Kathleen Kelly MacMillan, Carroll County Public Library, Eldersburg, MD Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.