“Blaze and the Castle Cake for Bertha Daye is a great search-and-find children’s story. A fun size book that will bring excitement to reading time. A must read! – Momma Braga
Synopsis
A rabble of soft, golden “chicklets” are awoken one morning to a startling proclamation: they only have ten short days to prepare for their best friend Bertha Daye’s party. It’s time to get to work building a larger-than-life castle cake to house and feed the revelers. Made of chocolate scooped out of chocolate mines, “finer than fairy dust” flour from the hillsides, and fruit carried down twigs and stems in the forest, this will be the best – and kookiest – cake of all time. Oodles of distinctive chicklets fill every page, scurrying, fluttering, napping, tumbling, helping, and getting up to no good. When the party day arrives, guests pour into the pastry palace, many of them unmistakable characters from iconic stories’ past, offering a marvelous who’s-who of story-book history. Claude Ponti’s nimble wordplay and punning, combined with his otherworldly and joyful illustrations, create an endearing gem of a book, bound to be a bedtime story favorite.
#MelAndNikkiReview
Blaze and the Castle Cake for Bertha Daye brings a new exciting read to bedtime! As the chicklets prepare for their friend’s big day, your child can have some search-and-find adventure with every page turn.
We love this story and with the pages being so big, it makes you feel like you are part of the story!
This story was written and illustrated by Claude Ponti and translated from French by Alyson Waters & Margot Kerlidou. Ponti is a master at wordplay. In the story try to point out all the made-up words as you read.
A fun activity to do with your child afterwards is to come up with your own words and phrases! It is a lot of fun and it was like making our own language that only we knew about. 😉
For this #MelAndNikkiReview, we give this book 5 stars out of 5! This story offers so much more than just a story. It offers an extension of one’s imagination, sense of adventure and the beauty of words. We highly recommend this book to everyone we know!
If you would like to purchase a copy of this book, click here.
About the Author and Illustrator
Claude Ponti is a French illustrator and children’s author known for his inventive and playful use of words and the symbolic nature of his illustrations. His first book, L’Album d’Adele, written for his newborn daughter, already displays the associative and dream-like presentation of children’s interior lives that characterizes many of his works. Ponti was awarded the 2006 Sorcieres Special prizer for his contribution to literature, which now includes over seventy books of all types and for all ages. Blaze and the Castle Cake for Bertha Days is Elsewhere Editions’ third book written and illustrated by Claude Ponti, following My Valley and Hiznobyuti.
Alyson Waters is the translator of My Valley and Hiznobyuti by Claude Ponti, in addition to several works from the French by Jean Giono, Louis Aragon, Eric Chevillard, Rene Belletto, Yasmina Khadra, and many others. She has received an NEA Translation Fellowship, a PEN Translation Fund grant, and the 2020 French-American Translation Prize. She teaches literary translation at Yale University and is the managing editor of Yale French Studies. She lives in Brooklyn.
Margot Kerlidou is a photographer, French tutor, and herbalist. Claude Ponti was her favorite author when she was a child. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
Until next time…Happy Parenting!
-Momma Braga
*Please note that this book was provided in exchange of an honest review. All opinions expressed are our own.
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