By Jon J Muth
A giant, gentle panda befriends three siblings and tells each one a short, calm Zen parable — about luck, anger, and giving something away.
A giant panda named Stillwater moves in next door, and across three visits he gets to know three siblings. Each time, he tells one child a small story. There's the farmer whose run of good luck and bad luck keeps flipping, so nobody can say which is which. There's the man so poor that a thief finds nothing to steal, who wishes he could have given the thief the moon instead. And there's a monk still stewing over a small slight hours after the moment has passed. Nothing gets explained. The stories just end, and sit there.
Each of the three stories stands on its own and runs only a couple of minutes, so one a night works fine, or read all three when you have the time. Muth's watercolors are soft and slow to look at, the kind of pages a child will linger on. And the parables don't ask a child to solve anything — a quiet idea gets handed over and left alone, which makes an easy landing at the end of a busy day. Some children will want to talk one over; some will just want to look at the paintings and drift.