The Empty Frame
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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.
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The Empty Frame
Another ghost story by the author of the fine Black Harvest has three children sent to stay at the old abbey. They soon begin to see and detect the presence of the ghost of the past, Lady Alice, who, stepping from her portrait, seems to be asking the children to deal with the mystery and murder of the past. There are clever links made between the different suffering of parents and children in the past and present and the resolving of the mystery comes with the message 'that it wasn't courage that cast out fear, it was love.' Despite having all the right elements of the successful ghost story, this one does not manage in the end to engage either the heart or the head.
