Old Shell, New Shell: A Coral Reef Tale

Helen Ward (Author) Helen Ward trained as an illustrator at Brighton School of Art, under the direction of well-known children's illustrators such as Raymond Briggs, Justin Todd, Chris McEwan and John Vernon Lord. In 1985, her final year at Brighton, Helen was awarded the first Walker Prize for Children's Illustration. Awards for Helen's work include The National Art Library Awards 1998 and 2001 for The Hare and the Tortoise and her version of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows in the Templar Classic series, and The National Art Library Award for The Tin Forest. She was shortlisted for the prestigious Kate Greenaway Award in 2003 for The Cockerel and the Fox. This book also won the award in the children's trade category at the British Book Design and Production Awards presented in November 2003. Helen Ward lives in Stroud, Gloucestershire. Wayne Anderson (Illustrator) Wayne Andersen has been illustrating in his colour pencil style for over 40 years and is renowned for his playful imagination and fantastic imagery. His titles for Templar include contributing illustrations to the worldwide best-seller Dragonology.

A brilliantly illustrated coral reef teeming with clownfish, spiny lobsters and sea slugs dominates this fictional account of a small hermit crab in search of a larger shell. In fact, Ward's (The Animal's Christmas Carol) paintings are so dazzling that the anthropomorphic story pales a bit in comparison. The tale opens lyrically: "In the watery gardens, where sea anemones flowered and fish as bright as butterflies sailed among the coral, there lived a hermit crab!" But the tone is not sustained, and the text is sometimes confusing (for example, the crab laments, "I need a shell... with some of these," but it's very difficult to tell what he is referring to). Some design features can be disconcerting (words are seemingly randomly emphasized with a large font), but the final sumptuous illustration that opens to a four-page panorama is appropriately impressive. The nine-page appendix describes the Great Barrier Reef setting and contains a numbered, smaller version of each painting that links detailed information about the habits and interdependency of the organisms found in coral reefs to many different fish and plants that populate the underwater scenes. Ages 5-7.

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