I’m looking for a picture book with beautiful, lifelike illustrations. Picture book, but dark and almost adult in nature. There were two in the series.
The first had a small blond girl, with braids over her head, who was the rightful queen of a kingdom ruled by a dark tyrant. At one point she confronts the tyrant by landing on his dinner table, I think. The tyrant might wear a weird mask. He’s dressed all in black. She has friends who wanted to help her get her kingdom back. They set up a system where they would light a fire on the upper level of the castle when it was safe for them all to start their attack. One man was stopped, but is so dedicated to her and the cause, that he lit himself on fire instead and jumped from the roof.

In the sequel, she has a baby (still blond braids roped over her head), and a soldier tries to lead her through the snow to safety. I think they all die, but I’m not sure it’s obvious.
Beautiful illustrations.

We’d love to reconnnect with this children’s book we had from our local library, but despite extensive online searching, can find no trace of it, as cannot remember or even guess at the title.

Illustrated short children’s book from c. 1990, for readers perhaps 5 – 9. The young heroine (age 8-ish, possibly called Anna) is not good at timekeeping, and is often late for tea. She therefore observes that ‘time is [like] a monster, marching on’. She meets the clock-keeper of the town hall clock, asks him about the nature of time, and he kindly on one occasion puts the clock back about 5 minutes, so that she does not seem late home for tea. The story and pictures have a mainland European feel to it. Someone suggested it may have been set in Switzerland. It is almost certainly a translation into English, and the English has that sense of maintaining a foreign idiom.
If this resonates with anything you recall, we will be overjoyed!