Once upon Another: The Tortoise and the Hare / The Lion and the Mouse

Two books in one: The Tortoise and the Hare and The Lion and the Mouse. An invitation to the imagination!

Kindergarten-Grade 3-- Two well-known fables by Aesop, The Tortoise and the Hare and The Lion and the Mouse , are paired here in a special way. Despite their different morals, these fables share a common theme: that appearances may be deceptive. MacDonald and Oakes illustrate these tales in a manner exactly suited to that theme. Abstract cut-paper shapes represent the actors and the settings; when readers finish one story they may turn the book upside-down and begin the other, reading the same (although inverted) shapes in a new context. Here the task is of a different order of magnitude than in Ann Jonas' Round Trip (1983) and Reflections (1987, both Greenwillow). The interpretive powers of the imagination are stretched, and the brightly colored forms (the tortoise/mouse is deep purple) and the pleasing texture of the lion/hare (in shaggy golden handmade paper) encourage involvement. A sophisticated exercise in gestalt, this book is perhaps too great a perceptual challenge for most young readers. --Patricia Dooley, Univ . of Washington, Seattle
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