Review: The English Roses

Madonna's last venture into bookmaking was Sex back in 1992, a shiny picture book displaying her own charms in mildly porny style. Eleven years later, Madonna has turned mumsy.

Her new venture, The English Roses, published today in 30 languages and 100 countries, is an illustrated story for kids of six and up - all of us under 40, in other words, infantilised as we all are by pop culture. "I hope these children's books inspire kids of all ages - even grown up ones," twitters the newly twee Madonna.

The English Roses (48 pages thick) "deals with envy and jealousy and how these emotions cause so much unnecessary suffering in our lives", says our new Enid Blyton in publicspirited mode, adding piously: "I only wish I had read about some of these subjects when I was a little kid."

The Roses are four cutesy little girls, one blonde, one dark, one red-haired, one black, all the best of friends.

In this first story of five (or so Madonna threatens), another girl, Binah, has been excluded from their magic circle because they are jealous of her. Binah is "very, very beautiful", with "long, silky hair and skin like milk and honey", as well as being an excellent student, very good at sport, kind to people and generally "special" - so perfect, in fact, that the others shun her out of sheer envy.

In reality, of course, the children who suffer wounding rejection from their peers are not the beautiful, the clever and the sporty, but the ugly, the dull and the awkward - but who wants to read about that?

The Roses' fairy godmother takes them to see what Binah's life is really like - and they discover that far from being so very enviable, her life is hard - and she keeps next to her bed a photograph of her equally beautiful mother, who died when she was small.

So they learn to be kind and not to trust appearances. A moral tale, then. Madonna has explained that she was driven to write these stories because when she came to read to her son Rocco, she found that children's books were all about princes and princesses and happy endings, and never about anybody "struggling for things". She must have got them from an antique shop. Children's literature today, even for the very young, majors on broken families, inner-city deprivation, handicap, and bereavement, as every parent knows.

The illustrations, by Jeffrey Fulkimari, are sub-Warholian, which is to say, highly decorative and distinctly perverse. The girls, all apparently suffering from anorexia, are dressed like mini-skirted fashion models, and their otherwise wholly featureless faces all have gaping eyes and rosebud lips. (The English Roses is published by Puffin at £12,99 but discounted to £6.49 already on Amazon. It is also available from Gap.)