Duffy and the Devil
by Margot Zemach
Summary
Harve Zemach retells a Cornish variant of the Rumpelstiltskin story, drawn from Cornish folklore. Duffy, a lazy servant girl hired to spin and knit for a squire, cannot actually do either task and is saved from being found out when a devil appears and offers to do all her spinning and knitting for her, on the condition that she guess his name within three years or belong to him afterward. Duffy lets the devil do her work for years, rising in the squire's household on the strength of a skill she does not have, until the deadline finally closes in and she overhears the devil, gloating to himself out in the woods, singing his own name in a song no one was ever supposed to hear. Duffy confronts him with the name he thought was safely secret, and the devil, beaten at his own trick, vanishes for good; Kirkus called the result "festive, funny and robustly inventive to the last twirl of the sly devil's tail".
Margot Zemach, who began illustrating children's books at her own husband's urging, renders the Cornish countryside and the devil himself in loose, comic ink and watercolor, giving the devil a genuinely unsettling grin even as the overall tone stays light enough for a folktale rather than tipping into real menace. It works well read aloud to children around five to nine, and the repeating rhythm of guessed names building to the one that finally lands gives even first time listeners a chance to see the ending coming just ahead of Duffy herself.
Historical Context & Significance
Duffy and the Devil, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1973, won Margot Zemach the 1974 Caldecott Medal and was also a finalist that year for the National Book Award in children's literature, alongside a spot on the 1976 Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list recognizing books with lasting appeal.
It was one of thirteen books Zemach made with her husband, Harvey Fischtrom, who wrote under the pen name Harve Zemach after urging her into children's book work in the first place with their earliest collaboration, A Small Boy Is Listening, in 1959. That year's Honor books were Susan Jeffers's Three Jovial Huntsmen and David Macaulay's Cathedral. She had already been named a Caldecott runner up in 1970 for The Judge, and later earned another for her own retelling, It Could Always Be Worse, in 1978, making Duffy and the Devil the single medal win bracketed by honors on either side of it.