The Pearl Princess

Last night Puitak and Gordon took us out to dinner.  We had Chinese food at the House of Gourmet in Chinatown.  The food was a bit oily for my taste, but that's the way Pui likes it.

I took the moment to lend Puitak a comic book we found in our house the other day.  It's "The Pearl Princess," part of the Classics Illustrated Junior series of fairy tale comics.  But this version was reprinted in the '90s on the occasion of the golden anniversary of the beginnings of Classics Illustrated.  (To my surprise, it was a higher print quality than the original!) I lent it to her because I may have another copy.  And Pui's bound to like it:  the English is simple, and people wear fancy clothes in it.  

This story is about a princess who told her father she loved him like salt, so he took offence and sent her away with a sack of salt on her back. (Her tears formed pearls, hence the title.) A bit like King Lear. They cite the Grimm Brothers collection, but Moira says it's a Russian story as well.  And the salt metaphor does describe family love well:  losing Mother feels a bit like running out of salt forever.

Those comics, besides the main fairy tale, would also have an Aesop's fable, here one about two fish swimming into a dangerous river; a page illustrating a children's poem, in this case a Lear limerick (they also did poems from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses); a page describing an animal, in this case the grebe; and a page for you to color in.