Although we owned the complete Hans Christian Andersen when I was a child, and I spent hours poring over it, I have no memory of Little Ida's Flowers, which made its picture-book debut here. The story of a young girl, who wonders why her flowers seem wilted in the morning, and who listens to her friend's tales of midnight flower-balls in the king's castle with growing wonder, it includes a dream sequence in which Ida witnesses just such a dance in her own home...

Although the story was sweet, and Linda Allen's pastel watercolor illustrations were pretty, I found the overall effect of Little Ida's Flowers rather uninspiring. The whole production seemed rather bland and uninteresting, and I had no trouble understanding why this tale - unlike so many of Andersen's more popular stories - had never before been made into a book of its own. I did enjoy Andersen's poke at his critics, in the guise of the "tiresome lawyer," who demands at one point: "How can anyone put such notions into a child's head?" but that one moment of sharp humor stand out like an exclamation point in an otherwise oppressively smooth narrative. All in all, this is a book (and a tale) I would only recommend to the Andersen completist. ( )