THE COPPER BRAID OF SHANNON O'SHEA

Young readers combing through Esckelson's debut picture book about a girl's unwieldy reddish plait will unfortunately encounter plenty of tangles and knots along the way. The author employs sometimes cumbersome verse to weave a playful but difficult-to-follow scenario. Envious of the way a piece of hay shines in Shannon's hair, a fairy plucks it from the girl's braid. Before long, a troupe of fairy folk is discovering all manner of objects and creatures—from buttons and thimbles to bears and birds (even "a small island which they named Atlantis")—in Shannon's 17-mile-long copper braid. The stanzas quickly become repetitive and contain several ambiguous pronouns that make it tricky to keep track of what's what and who's who ("The sprites should have known to leave the braid bound,/ To not start unknotting and fooling around/ When new bits of hay seemed to sprout from her hair/ Until she was sneezing with each breath of air"). In busy, wiry-lined compositions, Newton's (The Stonecutter) red-nosed, white-faced fairies look like clowns in a miniature circus run amok. A preponderance of red hair—atop every fairy's head—gives the proceedings an overall orange-yellow cast. Disappointingly, readers don't see Shannon herself until the final pages, when the sprites re-braid her unfurled (and now unfettered) locks. Ages 4-8. (Jan.)