By Jerry Pinkney
More than sixty of Aesop's fables, each a page or two with its moral, painted in warm watercolor by Jerry Pinkney.
These are some of the oldest stories we tell children — the tortoise and the hare, the lion and the mouse, the ant and the grasshopper, the boy who cried wolf. Jerry Pinkney gathered dozens of them into one big book and painted every animal in rich, close-up watercolor. Each fable runs a page or two and ends with its moral, and each one stands completely on its own. You can read one at bedtime or three on a rainy afternoon and never lose your place.
A fable is a whole story in about a minute, with a point at the end small enough for a young child to actually catch. That makes it easy to fit into a night when there's no time for a chapter, and it hands you a tiny conversation without your having to invent one. Since each fable is separate, you never run out of a good one for the moment. And Pinkney's art is the reason to own this edition rather than a plain paperback of the same tales — it's a book children lean in close to.