This book was cute and the illustrations too but i expected more magical ones.. it’s an easy read for kinds.

It's a big well done to this book – seriously, the words 'well' and 'done' might as well be in upper case.  This combines mysticism, fantasy and history, and never excludes one from the other.  The real world facts are that two girls got to be famous for being photographed quite winsomely alongside fairies – and only admitted in their dotage that the fabulous beasts were made of card and pinned in place.  But one of the ladies alleged permanently that the pictures were inspired by real events and real encounters with the little folk.  This book takes that as the truth – that the real fairies were too busy blowing raspberries at camera (and even, in fact, mooning) for decent images to be made.  So the girls had to resort to fabrication.  Whatever the case, this picture book – you seldom get more than a couple of sentences per spread – opens the young audience up to that world.  Discuss it with them and you may well find your young companion privy to the world of the fairies – but will that be for real, or only through the pages of fiction?  I could have wished for a slightly better design, as some images and faces aren't the most attractive, but this really does work.  It's fantasy and fact combined (OK, perhaps it's only fact – these pages demand you think the jury is still out) and it's really very pleasant indeed.  A strong four stars.

This is absolutely darling.  I adored the artwork style, and whilst I thought the wording didn't sparkle quite as much, I still thoroughly enjoyed reading this.

I first read about the Cottingley Fairy hoax some time during elementary school, and I did so with utter fascination, because even though I knew the girls involved had debunked their own story long ago, I still found it delightfully creepy. There was just something about those pictures... And of course I couldn't believe how well-drawn those paper clippings were! I loved the illustrations accompanying this recount of the case, and how it interwove the actual events with an alternative supernatural truth. I just don't think that a child without prior knowledge of the fake fairy encounters would appreciate this cute book as much? Or maybe, on the contrary, it's going to give rise to another generation of fae-obsessed kids, who knows.

*thank you to Netgalley and North South Books Inc. for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review*

2 stars.

This was just OK. The story was told well enough for little kids to understand. The fact that the illustrations were drawn in a childlike way would be either a hit or miss for you. For me, i didn't really like them so much but I do believe other people would actually prefer this style. I don't really have much to say about this as I just didnt connect with it. But as I said, I can see why some children would like it. Just wasnt for me so much and my little niece probably wouldn't like it as much either. I'm not saying it is a bad book though, just not one I'd read again.

The book is based on a story from 1918. Two little girls Elsie and Frances took photos of fairies, that some people believed were real. After almost six decades of denying it, they admitted the photos were montaged together to create the illusion that the fairies were real. The book is telling their story. I wish there was more text. The storyline is easy to follow, even the younger ones will understand it. The illustrations are beautiful, however I think a longer story (for example their adventures) and more illustrations would have benefited the book and it could have been a better adaptation of the real story.

The Cottingley Fairies is a story-like narration of the events of 1918, in which two young girls created fake pictures of fairies. Although the illustrations are pretty and the narration is sweet, the story stated that it would be the real story. However, this wasn't exactly the case: the narrator claimed that fairies do exist, and the whole story looked like it was trying very hard to defend the fake photographs; and that took a lot away from the beauty of this book.

I just wasn't a fan of this one. With a book like this, I expected more magical illustrations. Instead, these looked like the scribbles that I used to do when I was a kid, down to the uneven coloured-pencil fills and that weird overlap darkening you often get with markers. Some of the pictures looked more amateurish than others, which led to the book feeling kind of uneven.

The story fell sort of flat for me, too. Arthur Conan Doyle comes off looking rather stupid for believing and pushing the narrative so hard. (If you've ever seen the original photos, you'll probably agree that it's pretty obvious they're fake.) The fact that two little girls were able to fool so many people could've made for an interesting story, but that's not the direction this story took. In this book, the fairies were real all along, and while the girls did take photos of fake paper fairies, they admitted to their deceit (unlike it real life, where they kept up the charade for decades).

The subject matter is interesting, but the execution just didn't work for me here.

Sweet illustrations. Curious story. Would love to see these pictures in print, computers do not do any justice