A popular song around the holidays, “The Twelve Days of Christmas” is brought to life in this picture book. Each time the reader turns the page, they are treated to another line of the song illustrated in stunning detail with watercolor and colored pencil. With each day, the focus of the illustration moves out to include more gifts. The celebration begins with the partridge in a pear tree and continues with golden rings, carolers, maids, geese, drummers, pipers and more.

The Bottom Line: I could look at these amazing illustrations in this picture book for hours on end. This book includes the song along with a fascinating note about the song’s origins. This beautiful book is a treasure you will want to keep. Highly recommended for everyone.

This review also appears at the Mini Book Bytes Book Review Blog. ( )

Exquisitely beautiful, I read this book over again. Gennady Spirin is one of my favorite illustrators. He is a supremely talented artist. In this book, Spirin uses the well-known Christmas song and tale of the Twelve Days of Christmas. Starting with a partridge in a pear tree, he continues to build and luxuriously add the remaining eleven animals.

I keep all of Gennady Spirin's books because the artistic quality is matchless and incomparable. ( )

One of the most popular carols of the holiday season, The Twelve Days of Christmas provides the text for this beautiful new picture-book from master-illustrator Gennady Spirin. No stranger to Christmas-themed artwork, Spirin - who, the dust-jacket blurb informs us, was born on Christmas day - has previously worked on The Night Before Christmas, The Christmas Story, Joy to the World, and We Three Kings. Here he takes on the classic song celebrating the days from Christmas to Epiphany.

Each verse, which chronicles another gift given to the singer, is paired with a lovely, full-page pencil and watercolor illustration. The palette, as always, is rich, and the decorative borders surrounding the text, charming. Unfortunately, Spirin chooses to include the entire range of gifts in each painting, no doubt in an effort to reflect the text itself, necessitating an increasingly "zoomed out" effect. I appreciated the earlier illustrations, with their superior detail, much more than the later ones, and couldn't help but wish that Spirin had chosen to omit earlier gifts, in his depiction of later verses. Still, this is a beautiful edition, and with the inclusion of an informative afterword about the history of the song, as well as its sheet music, it would make a wonderful gift for the Christmas carol lover! ( )

Absolutely gorgeous. Gennady Spirin does beautiful classic illustrations for the classic song. Unsure of the success of this song as a read aloud. If no one participates I feel it could tank horribly?! Also, is it to long?! ( )

The question is, "Do we need another illustrated version of The Twelve Days of Christmas"?, and in the case of Gennady Spirin's edition the answer is a resounding yes. Our library owns versions whose text or illustration mimic the classic song. Spirin offers the traditional song with Renaissance style illustrations in which oval paintings form a window that contains the cumulative art. The illustrations are simply put, beautiful. ( )