The Hanrotts seem to have a handle on their chosen art form, the short story. This is after all what the book is, a series of bedtime short stories, interspersed with an interesting attempt at Chaucerian verse. A good short store will generally have the following characteristics:
Believable
Have a moral
Offer a surprise ending
Be entertaining
The tales in Telling Tales do not disappoint. My personal favorite was the Lawyer's Tale, but everyone will have their own favorite!
The authors have enveloped their cast in a spritzy atmosphere. Chaucer, with whom the authors are obviously well-acquainted, would have appreciated the acerbic wit tinctured with understanding of human folly chronicled in this worthy update of human tenacity in a careening world.
The authors' takes are never cloying. For example, demure Shirley the Bureaucrat, part of a world familiar to anyone who ever wedged into a surreal universe of cubicles and flow-chart organizations, played very rough (but fairly.)
The authors' energetic muse shines most brightly in the creative quirkiness of their surprise endings. The randy airline pilot, for example, or the herbalist with her secret aphrodisiac recipe -neither goes where you are sure they're headed. It's not giving anything away to note how hilariously fitting is the closing line in the personal trainer's tale: "Hey, I think I'll take one of those cream tarts." I don't usually notice illustrations but the caricatures opening each tale are great, friendly expansions of the wry humor of the tales themselves.
The authors do fair justice to Chaucer's appreciation of human joie-de-vivre but they avoid going over the top (or under the bottom, as the case may be.) I liked best Hanrott-Horsleys'using the great author's structure and kindly if skeptical world-view to hold up little mirrors to ourselves and the people we bump into at the gym, on the TV set, at the coffee shop - in short, in life! Cheers for us all!!