Janet Perlman’s fairy tale penguins return in a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Princess and the Pea. Keeping Andersen’s basic storyline, Perlman, an Academy Award-nominated animation filmmaker and children’s author, adds detail to expand upon the characters’ personalities and motivations.

In the original 1835 version, the queen quietly tests a young girl (who claims to be a princess) by putting a pea under her mattress. The delicacy of the girl (who can’t sleep a wink because of the pea) reveals that she’s a true princess – and one who suffers no qualms about being impolite by mentioning her horrible night’s sleep.

In Perlman’s version, the squinty-eyed Penguin Queen initially places a cabbage under a single mattress because she’s almost certain the princess is not noble-born. The Queen voices her doubts repeatedly. Twice, the polite princess hesitates to say how poorly she has slept; once upon the solitary mattress, and again upon 20 mattresses and 20 eiderdown quilts placed over a single pea. These and other details, such as the day of courtship the young royals spend playing shadow puppets, chess, and singing songs, bring new dimensions to the story.

Perlman’s animation-style illustrations, drawn by hand in ink, then computer-coloured, create a vibrant cartoon kingdom of penguin characters that are expressive and likeable. Her first fairy tale picture book, Cinderella Penguin,
presented more opportunity for bird-related puns and props (such as the “glass flipper”), but this retelling is still loads of fun with its avian spin on a classic story and its “flappily ever after” ending.