Fantastic & Fabulous
Penny Hall
Ritva Voutila

Koala Books 2001
Tadpoles 

0864613334

95p. pbk $10.95

This book was about mythical beings, lands and ideas.  It is an information book.  It is divided into six parts – Fantastic Worlds, Fabulous Creatures, Fantastic Characters, Fabulous Things, Fantastic Ideas and Afterword.

It gave me a surprise when I first started to read it because I thought it would be a story book.  Anyway, I thought it was great.  I actually learnt two things from it.  In the Wizard of Oz I learnt that when it was first made, the ruby slippers were silver with pointy toes.  The second thing I learnt was that JRR Tolkien spelt dwarfs wrong (he spelt it as dwarves), but then decided to keep the spelling.

The book has a green dragon on the front of it and has 95 pages.  This book was very interesting.  Once I started reading it, it took me very little time to read all of it.  My favourite part was about Griffins.

The illustrations in the book are by Ritva Voutila who was also the illustrator of another book I reviewed, Poppy’s Path.  Again they had no colour, just seeming to use lead pencil sketches.

I would recommend  this book to anyone who is interested in mythical beings and imaginary lands.  The information in this book really fits in with the title – Fantastic & Fabulous!

Rebecca, 8, Canberra