Young Brer Rabbit: And Other Trickster Tales from the Americas

A collection of fifteen Brer Rabbit trickster tales from the Afro-American culture of Central and South America and the Caribbean

Grade 3 Up Like the American Brer Rabbit and variants in the West Indies and Africa, "Tio Conejo" (Uncle Rabbit) is a rabbit trickster in folk tales from Central and South America. Weiss has collected 15 of these folk tales, including "The Wax Doll," a Columbian variant of "The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story" from The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus (Houghton, 1955) by Joel Chandler Harris. While Weiss has done a service by collecting these folk tales from little-known sources, she ignores their rich and unique background in her retelling and attempts to remold the stories into copies of Brer Rabbit stories of Harris and William F. Faulkner's The Days When the Animals Talked (Follett, 1977; o.p.). This weakens the stories greatly, since they are similar stories but not the same stories. Still, the book will have a place in large folk tale collections for study and comparison as the stories are not readily available elsewhere. Kay McPherson, Central Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, Ga.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.