| Summary: | After several weeks of trekking around Africa, it was a pleasure to find a fable book as we went through the Joburg airport. Notice the subtitle: bedtime tales with a twist. Gliori presents creative adaptations of traditional tales. There are nine stories here. The third through the sixth are fables. The first three of them are in verse. TMCM features a town mouse in high heels and lace. The country mouse is saved from the cat by a pigeon friend. In LM, the hunters actually interrupt the conversation between lion and mouse. In TH, the tortoise reads Proust. The hare uses an alarm clock but ends up sleeping for a whole day! The race between the wolf and hare is a variation of the traditional story of the hedgehog and hare; however, here the race goes across the North Pole and through Russia. Various rabbits pop up from their burrows, as delightful artwork on 50-51 shows. Rabbit had communicated with all of them on a cell phone! But this story has a great surprise ending. The fairy tales here are successful creative variations of the traditional tales. For example, nail soup is a ploy that th chicken uses first to stall, then to exhaust, and finally to fill up the fox that was going to eat her. Debi Gliori
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