The Beginning of the Armadillos

A tortoise and a hedgehog combine their natural assets and transform themselves into armadillos to escape the hungry attention of a young jaguar

Kindergarten-Grade 6?From the Just-So Stories comes this romp of a tale about how the hedgehog and the tortoise use language to muddle a young jaguar out of eating them. When they then understand that Mother Jaguar can't so easily be confused, they exert themselves to acquire each other's skills in swimming and in curling up. As a consequence of the hedgehog's soaking and the tortoise bending, they both mutate into new creatures?unidentifiable, but provisionally tagged "armadillo." Rowe's whimsical paintings foreground the main players (and quite a few amusing walk-ons) against a series of arbitrarily "evolving" abstractions of quasi-Amazonian flora. The wit of the illustrations is equal to the cleverness of the text: both may appeal most to those sophisticated 3-year-olds and 30-somethings who appreciate the obfuscatory qualities of language and the mutabilities of identity.?Patricia (Dooley) Lothrop Green, St. George's School, Newport, RI
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.