Poppy has graduated from picture books into these reassuring, well-observed, read-alone stories about the nature of friendship and a small girl's hopes and dreams

I loved, loved, loved this book. It's vivid, it's anarchic, it's unbearably cool . . . It's also very, very funny. There were moments when I had to put it down because I was howling with laughter . . . And if so much hilarity weren't enough, it's also very clever

A book to get teenage boys reading for the hell of it . . . A dark and funny book

Definitely the funniest, most obscenely wise book I have read in a long time

Every writer hates to hear the words "stunning new talent" applied to someone else, but in the case of Anthony McGowan nothing else will do

All demand to be read in translation of the originals and not sanitized retellings. Here, by examining letters, journals, annotations and posthumously unavailable papers, Zipes found some hitherto untranslated "ironic and macabre fables, humorous anecdotes, stories about the crusades, Norwegian legend, one 'feminist' tale among other things