By Demi
A village girl asks a greedy raja for one grain of rice, doubled every day for thirty days, and quietly takes back everything he took.
The raja has been collecting most of the village's rice for years, promising to keep it safe against famine. When famine comes, he keeps it anyway. Then Rani, a village girl, catches rice spilling from a basket and returns it, and the raja offers her a reward. She asks for one grain of rice, and then for the amount to be doubled every day for thirty days. He thinks she's foolish and agrees. By the end of the second week the servants are struggling. By day thirty they are carrying more than a billion grains on the backs of two hundred and fifty-six elephants, and there is nothing left in the storehouse.
This is a real folktale with a real spine, not a lesson in costume. Rani is quiet and patient and she beats the raja with nothing but a number, which is a deeply satisfying shape for a story. The doubling is the plot, so a child cannot follow the story without following the math, and the tension builds exactly as the numbers do: nothing much for a week, then a lurch, then something out of control. Demi's paintings are small and jewel-like with real gold leaf, which makes the moment they explode into the elephant foldout land even harder. It's the best marriage of story and mathematics on this shelf.