Zeee (An Hbj Contemporary Classic)

First published in 1965, an entrancing story about a ``bad fairy'' who's really ``bad about only one thing'': people. But bumblebee-sized Zeee has ample provocation: each time she sets up her delectably described, Borrower-style housekeeping--under a dock leaf, in an old pail on the beach, or in an empty wasp's nest--people, who can't see her, blunder in and destroy her home. Her retaliation is poetically just: e.g., her friends the moles dig up the immaculate lawn of the man who thought her dock-leaf roof was a weed. In the end, a little girl named Pandora does see Zeee, suggests that her name could be Hope, and offers a home; but it's the details along the way, not the tidy conclusion, that give the story its considerable charm--nicely echoed in Gaber's bright new watercolors, where tiny Zeee is appropriately diaphanous and baleful and the landscape and other inhabitants (like a cat that wonders whether Zeee ``tastes like bird'') are viewed intriguingly from her perspective. An appealing new presentation. (Fiction/Picture book. 6-10) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.