I enjoyed reviewing Jerry Pinkney's retelling of The Tortoise and the Hare this week. It was a much-loved tale from my puppyhood, as we dogs love to hear about animals running and chasing. When a tortoise and a hare enter into a footrace, the arrogant hare at first runs far ahead of the tortoise. Feeling confident he's won, the hare decides to stop for a snack and a rest. While he's sleeping, the tortoise passes him by and wins the race. Winner of the 2014 ALSC Notable Children's Book award and included in the "Best Children's Book" picks by not one but four book reviewers (including School Library Journal and Booklist), Pinkney takes a classic Aesop fable and uses vibrant, detailed illustrations to make the moral of the story come alive on the page.
While some fables may be too allegorical for the youngest of readers to fully comprehend, Pinkney helps make the message come through loud and clear: the only text in the book (besides very minimal initial dialogue to set the scene) is the moral of the story, "slow and steady wins the race." Pinkney cleverly builds up to the full adage, building the sentence by adding one word on at a time. This method of repetition is particularly well-suited to young readers, offering them the chance to practice their prediction skills in guessing what word will come next.
Where this book really shines is the illustrations. Intricate and colorful, Pinkney leaves little eyes plenty of information to read without needing words to tell the tale. Kirkus Reviews says of the book, "The ingenious layout mixes bordered panels, spot illustrations and full-bleed single- and double-page spreads, arranged to convey each racer’s alternating progress through a golden landscape. Bejeweled with blooming cactuses and buzzing with bees, reptiles, mammals and more, the desert tableaux will engross readers. The critters’ bits of clothing—hat, bandanna, vest—add pops of color and visually evoke the jaunty characters of Br’er Rabbit stories"(Kirkus Reviews, 2013). He evokes a delightful scene by setting the story in the American Southwest, replete with native flora and fauna (including the tortoise and hare themselves).
My favorite part about this book is the final page, where the hare takes his black and white checkered bandanna that was used for the finish line flag and places it gently around the tortoise's neck, showing that there are no hard feelings about who won the race. The Horn Book comments, "Pinkney nicely allows the hare to have more redeeming qualities than in most versions of this fable" (Robinson, 2013). I was glad to see Pinkney include good sportsmanship in the tale, as many fables have one-dimensional characters that are characterized by a single quality, such as arrogance, laziness, kindness, or perseverance. This story stands apart from other fables because of his inclusion of that gracious final illustration of the hare (and the friendship continues past the last page and onto the back cover, as the tortoise and the hare march off together.)
When sharing this fable with your pups at home, a natural pairing would be to read this story along with Pinkney's Caldecott Award-winning The Lion and the Mouse, another fable that is short on text but big on story. Another fun activity would be to have children choose a short saying or aphorism to illustrate in Pinkney's style, building the phrase one word at a time as the pages turn. This book also works beautifully for comparing and contrasting versions of the fable, as The Tortoise and the Hare has been retold for generations.
No matter what your feelings are about fables, The Tortoise and the Hare is sure to leave its mark as an enduring and beautiful example of Aesop's fable. I give it two paws up!
-Charlie Brown, basset hound
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ReferencesPinkney, Jerry. 2013. The Tortoise and the Hare. New York: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN
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