Manju GregoryCritiques

I personally enjoy this Korean version of Hansel and Gretel. The main reason on why I do is because my first generation parents read to me this book when I was a young child. However, there are other reasons as to why I like this book. Sometimes, I find the illustrations in some books to be unclear and hard for children to grasp what the illustration is trying to show. Sometimes it is because the artistic level of the illustrator is too difficult for children (such as blurry scenes). In this book, the illustrations are very clear and direct. Korean children illustrators tend to use bright colors that are vibrant for kids to catch, and they outline their character with black to make the pictures clean. I also appreciate on how at the left bottom corner of each page there is a small picture that captures the essence of what is going on in the text. For example, on one page, the author is writing about how Hansel and Gretel are lost in the woods when it is dark. At the bottom left corner, there is a picture of a black bat and some black tree branches. I think this helps readers understand the main point of each page. Finally, I like this book because of how the author clearly sums up the moral of the story at the end of the story. On the very last page in pink text, the author writes, “Even though you have no food to eat, abandoning your children is a bad thing to do. This is a story of the kind Hansel and Gretel and how they were able to win at the end.”