Blaze and the Castle Cake for Bertha Daye
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Claude Ponti’s nimble wordplay and punning, combined with his phantasmagorical and joyful illustrations, create an endearing gem of a book, bound to be a bedtime story favorite.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ponti (My Valley) once again unleashes his extravagant, surrealistic imagination and love for oversize formats (this one measures 15 inches tall) in a picture book about preparing for the ultimate birthday party. At the behest of masked leader Blaze, an enormous community of yellow chicklets create an "irrisistablicious" castle birthday cake—both habitable and edible—to honor their BFF Bertha Daye. Though Blaze's management techniques seem comically limited to watching and pointing, Ponti 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? As the chicklets spend 10 days prepping, they pen and mail invitations, extract riches from a Chocolate Mine, and gather other improbable ingredients. 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: Betty Boop and the cast of In the Night Kitchen boogie with Maggie Simpson and Super Mario (readers may have to do a little hunting to find the guest of honor). 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. Ages 5–9.
