Age 4-8

To illustrate this glorious and enticing picturebook, Lauren Child made miniature sets out of cereal packets and doll’s-house furniture, filled them with paper figures of people and furnished them with objects put in place by tweezers. What child could resist the combination of tiny scale and make-believe? Photographed by Polly Borland, the resulting interiors look like Vermeers, with their chiaroscuro lighting, blue Delft tiles and dark panelling. The exteriors twinkle with lights, stars and a thematically important glittery moon. All this would be delightful on its own, but the text, with its expressive variety of typefaces, is also a witty and original retelling of the classic fairy tale and ingeniously constructed. Early on, for example, the king sighs: “The only problem with real princesses . . . is that they are terribly hard to get hold of and almost never read their post.” Some pages later, the real princess runs out of her (to die for) treehouse, trips down the garden path and steps “over a pile of unopened letters”.

(Puffin £12.99)

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