Having fallen in love with a human princess, a hippopotamus goes to a magician to be turned into something that the princess could love in return.

Now in paperback - Phoebe Gilman and Joanne Fitzgerald's beautiful story about the transformative power of love. When a little hippo falls in love with an Egyptian princess, he hopes that a great magician can turn him into a human boy. Alas, even the magician can't perform such a feat! Instead, the magician turns him into a toy that the princess can playwith - a beautiful blue hippo on wheels. The princess adores her toy and takes him everywhere with her. But little girls don't play with toys forever. The princess grows up and yearns for a true love. Can the hippo make her wish come true? Based on a story by Joan Grant, The Blue Hippopotamus was Phoebe Gilman's final book. The illustrations by Joanne Fitzgerald were inspired by sketches Phoebe drew before her death in 2002. *A Governor General's Award nominee!

The Middle Kingdom (ca. 2030–1650 B.C.) was a transformational period in ancient Egypt, during which older artistic conventions, cultural principles, religious beliefs, and political systems were revived and reimagined. Ancient Egypt Transformed presents a comprehensive picture of the art of the Middle Kingdom, arguably the least known of Egypt’s three kingdoms and yet one that saw the creation of powerful, compelling works rendered with great subtlety and sensitivity. The book brings together nearly 300 diverse works— including sculpture, relief decoration, stelae, jewelry, coffins, funerary objects, and personal possessions from the world’s leading collections of Egyptian art. Essays on architecture, statuary, tomb and temple relief decoration, and stele explore how Middle Kingdom artists adapted forms and iconography of the Old Kingdom, using existing conventions to create strikingly original works. Twelve lavishly illustrated chapters, each with a scholarly essay and entries on related objects, begin with discussions of the distinctive art that arose in the south during the early Middle Kingdom, the artistic developments that followed the return to Egypt’s traditional capital in the north, and the renewed construction of pyramid complexes. Thematic chapters devoted to the pharaoh, royal women, the court, and the vital role of family explore art created for different strata of Egyptian society, while others provide insight into Egypt’s expanding relations with foreign lands and the themes of Middle Kingdom literature. The era’s religious beliefs and practices, such as the pilgrimage to Abydos, are revealed through magnificent objects created for tombs, chapels, and temples. Finally, the book discusses Middle Kingdom archaeological sites, including excavations undertaken by the Metropolitan Museum over a number of decades. Written by an international team of respected Egyptologists and Middle Kingdom specialists, the text provides recent scholarship and fresh insights, making the book an authoritative resource.

Writing The Blue Hippopotamus was great fun-sort of reliving my early life and making some incidents even better than they were the first time. What I wanted most of all was to write a page-turner, to give the reader a chance to actually live and feel what I had lived and felt. In a sense, my own life was a page-turner, from day to day, and a wonderful one that I enjoyed and loved-even the difficult and painful happenings. I think that I've been tremendously lucky to have had such a-almost a charmed life-and that's what I wanted to share with the reader. Yes, there were moments and incidents that were difficult and sometimes very painful, like when I said my final goodbye to Maidi, the love of my life, and what a remarkable love that was-several professional authors have called that good-bye "heartbreaking," and so it was. It was my heart that was breaking, and Maidi's, but we both knew that it had to be that way, and we accepted it. And then of course, many, many years later, we finally met again by chance, or by accident, in Paris, and the closure we had needed for so many years finally arrived. I wrote the book when I was ninety, and I was the last survivor of our group of five. We had all been made to swear that we would never tell. But after seventy years, I felt the story could, and should, be told.

The late Alice Kane was born in Ireland in 1908. Moving with her parents to Canada in 1921, she was educated in New Brunswick and at McGill University in Montreal before beginning a career with the Toronto Public Library, where she had a major interest in fairy tales. After her retirement in 1973, she taught Children’s Literature at the University of New Brunswick, then began a second career as a professional storyteller in association with the Storytellers School of Toronto. She was a featured performer at many storytelling events, including the American Storytelling Festival at Jonesborough, Tennessee. Her rich oral heritage is remembered in Songs and Sayings of and Ulster Childhood, edited by Edith Fowke (1983).