Blaze and the Castle Cake for Bertha Daye
by Claude Ponti
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Pub Date 3 May 2022 | Archive Date 9 Jan 2022
Archipelago | Elsewhere Editions
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Description
From one of the world’s most beloved children’s book authors comes a story of a high-spirited flock of friends building an unusual birthday cake.
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 distinctive 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.
Advance Praise
PRAISE for Claude Ponti’s My Valley
"A mix of comical vignettes and broad vistas illustrate an account of the lives and misadventures of a clan of tiny Twims.... Action with immersive, full-page or larger land- and seascapes that seem to go on forever while offering multitudinous crags, glades and foreground features to investigate." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Ponti’s beautiful, intricate illustrations contain strange details hinting at larger stories. The guileless narrative sounds like it came directly from the brain of a child with a vivid imagination."
— Sarah Hunter, Booklist
"Ponti’s dreamy paintings of towering trees and distant hills are worth lingering over. . . Fans of immersive fantasy worlds will feel that they have discovered a treasure."
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781953861184 |
| PRICE | US$20.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 48 |
Featured Reviews
Reading T, Reviewer
Thank you, Archipelago and the author, for the advance reading copy.
This book took me by surprise. I haven't read a storybook with the illustrations taking over entirely for each page! And it's like an unbelievable dreamlike story for me when I opened the book.
The characters remind me so much of the minions! It's fun to see so many of the chicklets.
The story provides a good representation of how a community works in order to build something big and important.
An awesome read.
Reviewer 862775
5 *stars*
Since I have a small reader growing up at home, I definitely started looking at children's books. I want to read them before I pass it on to the little one. This book is very cute and delightful. The illustrations are a bit like "Where's Waldo", where there's a lot to see on the page, the only difference being that there are small golden "chicklets" here.
In life, this book illustration is definitely much more beautiful than from the Kindle!
Thank you!
Geoff U, Educator
Really cute! Felt like a cross between where's Waldo and Rube Goldberg, with a side of the smurfs. The ducks were quite cute and I liked the mini-narratives (like the ballooning ducks) that were carried over page after page.
Jen N, Reviewer
Blaze and the Castle Cake for Bertha Daye has all of the full-page ultra-detailed art that one expects from Claude Ponti. Reading this along with a young child, you could spend hours looking at every little detail - the illustrations of the story, but also the hidden jokes, the references to other characters, and just the tiny flourishes that make up the backgrounds.
The translation, by Alyson Waters and Margot Kerlidou valiantly attempts to keep Ponti's word play. Unfortunately, keeping both the meaning and the play is always a challenge, and some of the choices land a bit awkwardly down to the title itself ("Bertha" just doesn't have the neutrality of "Anne" even if it keeps the birthday/anniversaire pun). But that's a minor complaint with a book like this where the art is 90% of the reason to pick it up.
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