Few elements of the Grimm tale remain, except the worn shoes, the illicit dancing, the outsider who solves the mystery, and the cloak of invisibility. Text is boxed with old frayed sneakers and laces. The strutting, high-stepping brothers are full of individuality, attitude, and movement. Nelson's pencil drawings were photocopied and then painted in oils, producing a fine line, minutely detailed characters and settings, and expressively lit coloration. The setting for Allen's fresh imagining is "a little village called Harlem." Her hip text is given spark and personality through the use of contemporary dialect: Sunday's cookies " were jump up and down, slap yo' own self in the face good!" The humor of the story is heightened by the artwork. Only when the ingenious housekeeper, Sunday, attempts to reveal the brothers' secret is Reverend Knight's own predilection for dancing disclosed and the family-along with the bewitching Sunday-reconciled. Believing that their father would not approve of their clandestine dancing at the Big Band Ballroom, the 12 boys refuse to confide in him. Kindergarten-Grade 4-A spin-off of the Grimm tale, "The Twelve Dancing Princesses," this is the story of Preacher Knight and his attempts to solve the mystery of the worn-out sneakers he finds in his sons' room each morning.
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