What a delight this book is! Lovely photographs and humourous illustrations of crushed fairies abound.

Angelica Cottington is 16 years old when she finds a diary of her long-deceased older sister, Euphemia. Euphemia has photographed several fairies, and writes about her adventures with them in the woods. Twelve years later, Angelica is appalled by her sister's behaviour. Angelica detests fairies and squashes them dead in the very diary her sister left praising them.

As we read the diary entries and Angelica's notes, we come to understand what really happened to Euphemia. A lovely fairy tale indeed! ( )

On her sixteenth birthday Angelica Cottington discovers an album that had once belonged to her sister Euphemia. It had been twelve years since her sister had passed, a sister she bearly remembered but for a few kindnesses. However the entries with this album reveal to Angelica the character of a girl lead astray by the fairies, portraying Euphemia as she has never been revealed before.

Lady Clottington's Pressed Fairy Album continues Angelica's story, and fairy pressing, through the revealing entries of a lost album. In this we learn not only of Euphemia's life and love of capturing fairies in photos, we learn of Angelica's reactions to her sisters exploits. But the most shocking truth of all is still to come, if only Angelica could refrain from squashing fairies for a moment or too. Another beautifully constructed and elegantly pictured book in the cottington series. ( )

The pressed fairy book always appealed to me (I even remember the bookstore I was in the first time I saw it) so this was a natural follow on. The underlying storyline isn't childish in the least but at the time I couldn't tell. ( )

Way back in 1994 Brian Froud and Terry Jones got together and created Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book, which was an immediate hit (and a huge bestseller). Their faux-Victorian book of various smashed, crushed, and smooshed fairies was a delight ­ wonderful pictures by Froud and hysterical text by Jones. A Pressed Fairy Journal followed in 1996, and then both went out of print and became scarcer than hen’s teeth. A paperback version of the original book was released in 2001 and it garnered a whole new set of fans. And now, at last, Lady Cottington is back and it’s well worth the wait.

The original book was a lark, with Froud’s hilarious pictures highlighting Jones’s tale of a VERY proper Victorian lady beset by naughty fairies. This book has the same antic artwork, and is undeniably funny in places, but it’s something more, too. The book purports to be a newly discovered photo album by Angelica Cottington’s older sister Euphemia (who is referred to just once, as Effie, in the original book) with later commentary by Angelica. Euphemia’s story and photos unfold on the left side of the book; Angelica’s commentary and fairy victims appear on the right. The two stories come together in a letter at the end which we get to see and which Angelica presumably did not and the effect is surprising and poignant and leads you to think about this book long after it has ended. The funny stuff I expected; the other stuff I didn’t, and the book is much stronger than you might expect because of it.

Froud has pulled off the near impossible: a sequel that not only equals the original, but surpasses it. The packaging is gorgeous, from the textured cover to the beautiful endpapers. The artwork, both the photos and the drawings, is first-rate but the true heart of this book is the story, which manages to amuse and surprise in equal measure ( )

I SF-bokhandeln hittade jag denna förtjusande bok, vilken utger sig för att vara en kopia av ett album som nämnda dam på sin sextonde födelsedag, 13 januari 1904, lyckades slå igen om och fånga avbildningar av en hoper älvor i.

Boken skall egentligen ha föregåtts av en tidigare volym med pressade älvor, men det var inget problem att ändå ta till sig innehållet, trots att det förutom platta oknytt även finns en historia häri: boken skall från början ha tillhört lady Cottington's äldre, döda syster, och på varje uppslag har denna på vänstra bladet placerat ett foto av en älva och skrivit en kort anteckning, medan den yngre systern har fått fatt på en eller flera bevingade varelser på det högra och sedan kommenterat dem och sin systers text. Snart framgår dock att den äldre systerns kontakter med älvorna inte var så oskyldiga som det till en början verkade, och att de troligen har något att göra med hennes allt för tidiga bortgång.

Det är en rätt trevlig, om än mer charmfull än djup, bok: älvorna är förtjusande okynniga och de båda damerna nästan lika förtjusande oskyldiga (speciellt när de får brev från onkel Henry i Paris, där han tycks ägnat mesta tiden åt att umgås med det lätta gardet). Teckningarna och fotografierna är trevliga, och på det hela taget är det en skoj, men långt ifrån oundgänglig bok. ( )