Ian Penney's Book of Fairy Tales

No doubt the fans of Penney's deliciously off-center Book of Nursery Rhymes will seek out these lushly illustrated fairy tales. Again basing his illustrations on houses, gardens and estates preserved by Great Britain's National Trust, Penney brings an antiquated, sometimes eerie, blue-blood beauty to eight mostly traditional tales. ``Rapunzel,'' ``The Three Bears'' and other classics are spiked by two unusual entries, ``The Willow Plate Story'' and ``The Legend of Finn McCool.'' Penney's storytelling is surprisingly restrained given his quirky visual sense. He cuts loose a bit in a humorous ``Princess and the Pea'' (the prince thinks that his mother has ``lots of funny old ideas about royalty that seemed a bit like hocus-pocus''), but most of his stories are straightforward and some of them are sweetened (a la the witch handily reformed by Hansel and Gretel). Similarly, the oddness and complexity of the illustrations in Nursery Rhymes seem turned down a notch here. All ages. (Dec.)