Aesop's Fables

Author/illustrator Jerry said in his introduction, that he either knew the moral or the tale of some of the stories, but hadn’t connected the two until this project. I felt the same way after reading this book. I knew many of the sayings, but not the stories they came from. Pinkney’s book put

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them together for me. This is a book steeped in thousands of years of common cultural wisdom. I see this as both a reference book and a contemporary storybook. The fables are still relevant for contemporary society.

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Aesop's Fables is a collection of short tales with a moral. The illustrations in this edition are watercolors by Jerry Pinkney. The collection includes many of the classics I remember from my childhood like, The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing and The Grasshopper and the Ants. Many of the fables are only

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one or two paragraphs long. My favorite is The Lion and the Mouse. It is about a lion who allows a mouse to go free and is later saved by the mouse. This was also my favorite fable as a child. This edition includes a full page watercolor of the lion being freed from the mouse.

Aesop's Fables has wide classroom applications. They could be used as a short read around. Children could also rewrite and modernize the tales, keeping the morals the same. A class could even create their own collection of modernized tales.

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Pinkney doesn't a wonderful job bringing Aesop's fables to life. They are very well-written and his take on the fables are a little more detailed which I like. Some of my favorites areThe Shepard Boy and the Wolf,The Tortoise and the Hare and The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse.

Beautifully written and illustrated version of the classic Aesop's fables.

This book is loaded with folktales for all ages. It is chuck full of good morals to teach children. I would use this book to teach children about folklore and the many tales would be helpful in addressing friendship issues between students. I would recommend this book to children in K-4th grade.

My Aesop reading project continues apace, with this, my ninth collection of fables. Retold and illustrated by the award-winning Jerry Pinkney, whose work has been given the Caldecott Honor five times, this Aesop's Fables presents sixty-one of the classic morality tales, as well as a brief

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introduction, in which the author lays out his own relationship with the subject matter.

Here the reader will encounter many old favorites, from The Grasshopper and the Ants to The Fox and the Grapes. Here too the reader will discover some lesser-known selections, from The Gardener and the Dog to The Boy and the Almonds. Retold in a contemporary idiom that never feels forced, Pinkney's adaptation feels simultaneously fresh and familiar.

The artwork is deliciously expressive - Pinkney's faces, whether human or animal, show great emotional range, and I appreciated his multicultural approach, in depicting people of diverse racial backgrounds. While I feel very strongly that the cultural identity of any work of folklore should be respected, many of these fables are universal, and an Asian fisherman, African-American milkmaid, European farmer, all have their place in Aesop.

That said, I did wonder a little at Mr. Pinkney's choice, in King Log and King Stork (also known as The Frogs Who Desired a King), to substitute "the sun" for Zeus. Where there is a specifically Greek context to the fables, I think it should be retained, but this is a minor quibble, and did not effect my enjoyment of this otherwise excellent collection.

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Some version of Aesop's Fables should be included in every children's library. This version has excuisite illustrations and almost all of the truly great tales. We can all learn a lesson or two by reading or re-reading these stories.

This book would be great to use at the elementary level to teach students about morals and folklore. The tales that are included inside are all ones that children will be interested in and can learn something from.

I liked this book and really liked the illustrations. I think the moral lessons are wonderful and this is a book I would like to read to my kids and I think I could read it at different points in their lives and they will connect to the stories in different ways as they get older.

I hadn't read these in years, but now with children of my own I pulled out my copy so we could enjoy them as a family. These tales never get old, and my children loved them so much we're reading them again. A classic that isn't going anywhere.