Spider Spider - Softcover

Banks, Kate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374469865 ISBN 13: 9780374469863

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 2000

Synopsis

In a tête-à-tête reminiscent of Margaret Wise Brown's The Runaway Bunny, a mother and son explore what it might be like if the boy were a spider.

About this title

About the Author:

Kate Banks and Georg Hallensleben have collaborated on several books for children. Kate Banks lives on the French Riviera. Georg Hallensleben lives in Paris.

From School Library Journal:

Kindergarten-Grade 1-Originally published in France, this tete-a-tete between a boy and his mother takes on the cozy cadences of Margaret Wise Brown's Runaway Bunny (HarperCollins, 1942), but ends with a startling, not altogether comforting twist. Watching a spider on the living-room floor, Peter announces that he'll become a spider, eat crumbs from his mother's plate, and crawl into her bed to bite her toe. What would she do then? Sweep him out the door, she replies, or wash him down the drain. What if he just crawled onto her book and fell asleep? She promises to place him in a nest of towels and sheets. If he hid in her sleeve? She would shake him out and then become a spider too. Setting this conversation in a small, well-kept apartment, Hallensleben uses warm impressionistic watercolors in muted shades to give mother and child dark, quiet eyes and relaxed postures. Peter as a green-and-white spider with red, fanglike mouth parts is seen both at arm's-length and close-up, but readers are still likely to be taken aback by the final spread, in which he suddenly almost fills the page, facing his even larger arachnid mother. Probably not a good choice for bedtime reading, this title should still find a ready audience of children who enjoy stories with a bit of a jolt at the end.
John Peters, New York Public Library
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0374469865
• ISBN 13: 9780374469863
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 32
• Illustrator: Hallensleben Georg