THE LITTLE ROOSTER AND THE DIAMOND BUTTON

Little Rooster is delighted when he finds a diamond button, which will allow him to buy his food rather than eat the worms and bugs he calls his friends, until a sultan walking down the road sees the button and wants it for himself.

K-Gr 4-Versions of this traditional tale can be found in various forms from the French "Drakestail" to the "Cock and the Hand Mill" in Aleksandr Afanasev's Russian Fairy Tales (Pantheon, 1976) to "The Little Rooster and the Turkish Sultan" found in Kate Seredy's semi-autobiographical The Good Master (Puffin, 1986), which is listed as the main source for this almost identical retelling. A little rooster lives with a kindly, impoverished old woman. One day, while he is scratching for bugs and worms, he finds a diamond button. Before he can pick it up, it is snatched from under his beak by the greedy imperial sultan. The thwarted rooster chases the ruler to his palace to demand its return, but the sultan has his servants throw the rooster in the well or the fire or the beehive. Each time an attempt is made on his life, the rooster summons his stomach to save himself. Fed up, the sultan gives the rooster the treasure he seeks. Retelling the tale in picture-book format reinvigorates the story, making it available to new audiences. Fitzgerald's watercolor illustrations are intricate, enchanting, and elegantly framed with braided borders. Young audiences will clamor for this tale over and over again.

Be Astengo, Alachua County Library, Gainesville, FL

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Ages 5-8. The woman who owns Little Rooster is very poor, too poor to feed him. One day the rooster finds a diamond button, but before he can give it to the woman, a greedy sultan takes it. The rooster manages to annoy the sultan and his servants so much that they give him the button plus many more to take back to his owner. The moral of this retelling of a classic Hungarian folktale about greed may confuse kids, and the author's note fails to explain why the story seems to be set in the Middle East. It's the illustrations that work best: beautiful, colorful, and detailed, they make this book worth adding to a larger folktale collection. Marta Segal
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