Blanche Weatherspoon’s uptight family will only let the unfortunate child wear black and white, like Queen Victoria. After Felicity, a flower-seller, gives Blanche a pink dress that her family promptly throws in the trash, the girl runs away – to be with Felicity. A misunderstanding nearly has Felicity arrested for kidnapping Blanche, but the girl protests, saying the flower-seller is her friend. All is forgiven and the Weatherspoon family instantly becomes more liberal, colourful, and merry: “Everyone was smiling as they’d never smiled before.”

Despite pleasant illustrations and a nicely worded retelling of a classic scenario, this book fails to reach the potential of its premise. In comparison with the characters of English writer Joan Aiken, who plays brilliantly with Victorian stereotypes in The Wolves of Willhoughby Chase, Toews’ characters lack depth and individuality. As a whole, the story lacks tension and drive. The stakes are too low and the climax is spurious – Felicity doesn’t really do anything to provoke the Weatherspoons’ sudden change of heart. We see scant evidence of an enlightened household (“Mrs. Black [the housekeeper] had a good word for the servants”): the characters’ journey seems distinctly less than profound.

Bonder portrays a severe black-and-white world transformed by Felicity’s kind acceptance of Blanche, but the transformation lacks the sense of revelation of, say, the shift from black-and-white to colour in the movie The Wizard of Oz. Because the “pre-colour” illustrations are not strictly black-and-white, there’s not sufficient contrast with later pages. Bonder’s gracefully coloured but caricature-like drawings evoke very little mood, especially when compared with the sinister, delicate silhouettes Pat Marriott created for Willhoughby Chase>/i>.

An entertaining look at some aspects of Victorian life, Black-and-White Blanche remains merely adequate where it could have been atmospheric, heartfelt, and illuminating. Pity.