Winnie Flies Again - Softcover

Korky Paul was born in Zimbabwe and is one of seven children. He studied Fine Art at Durban Art School, South Africa and Film Animation at CalArts, California, and started his working life in advertising. He illustrated the Winnie The Witch series for Oxford University Press, which won the
Children's Book Award.

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.)

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