Aesop's Fables (Dolly Parton's Imagination Library)

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K-Gr. 3. Aesop's fables have been retold for centuries, and there's no end in sight. Sneed offers 15 retellings (the sixteenth, the "Tortoise and the Hare," is wordless) in sometimes jarringly contemporary language but keeps the classic morals at the end of each. The lazy grasshopper tells the ants to "Take a load off," and the rooster soon to become the eagle's lunch cries, "What?! Nobody wants a piece of me?" Each fable is a double-page, full-bleed spread, and the text is brief, a few paragraphs at most. Watercolor, colored pencil, and acrylic paintings are fully realized; the animals are depicted in surreal detail but with exaggeratedly human expressions. Note the supercilious grin on the face of the fox, who is flattering the crow into dropping the cheese in its beak. Not as elegant as Doris Orgel's The Lion and the Mouse and Other Aesop's Fables (2000) but not as serious either. GraceAnne DeCandido
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