• Blaze and the Castle Cake for Bertha Daye
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Elsewhere Editions

Blaze and the Castle Cake for Bertha Daye

Blaze and the Castle Cake for Bertha Daye

by Claude Ponti, translated from French by Alyson Waters & Margot Kerlidou

$20.00
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Available as E-Book Children's Literature French Literature
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A rabble of soft, golden “chicklets” are awoken one morning to a startling proclamation: they only have ten short days to prepare for their best friend Bertha Daye’s party. It’s time to get to work building a larger-than-life castle cake to house and feed the revelers. Made of chocolate scooped out of chocolate mines, “finer than fairy dust” flour from the hillsides, and fruit carried down twigs and stems in the forest, this will be the best—and kookiest—cake of all time. Oodles of chicklets fill every page, scurrying, fluttering, napping, tumbling, helping, and getting up to no good. When the party day arrives, guests pour into the pastry palace, many of them unmistakable characters from iconic stories’ past, offering a marvelous who’s-who of story-book history. Claude Ponti’s nimble wordplay and punning, combined with his phantasmagorical illustrations, create an endearing gem of a book, bound to be a bedtime story favorite.

Additional Book Information

Series: Elsewhere Editions
ISBN: 9781953861184
Pages: 48
Publication Date:

Praise

Ponti once again unleashes his extravagant, surrealistic imagination and love for oversize formats . . . [He] fills every inch of the pages with antics, creating a visual impact that’s like a mash-up of Minions, Miyazaki, and Where’s Waldo? . . . The party itself is positively eye-popping, with attendees who include a plethora of beloved, generation-spanning figures from children’s literature and popular culture . . . Like all birthday parties, the overall experience is a little overwhelming, but there’s no doubt that the proceedings are animated by a generous and genial creative spirit.
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

This visual jaw-dropper . . . is about a huge flock of “chicklets” who wake one morning to realize they have 10 days to create “the most unbelievalicious castle of all cakes” for their best friend Bertha Daye’s party . . . The immersive illustrations by a veritable children’s literature superstar in his native France are a crazy salad of “Where’s Waldo?,” Hayao Miyazaki, classic Hanna-Barbera and Maurice Sendak, splashed with a hallucinogenic vinaigrette. The riotous party is held inside the giant cake and attended by a who’s who of pop culture characters, among them Betty Boop, Tinkerbell, Babar, Maggie Simpson and Yoda. This dazzling spread alone is worth the cost of the book.
—Catherine Hong, New York Times Book Review

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