Tales of Wisdom and Wonder

Lupton has selected seven stories from the rich corpora of Haitian, Cree, English, French, West African, Russian and Irish folklore, and retold them in a brisk and picturesque vernacular, at the same time modulating the style of the retelling to suit the character of the tale. Readers familiar with the dream of the Peddler of Swaffham will find a version here that is a lot breezier than most. There is an incantatory Cree tale about a shamanistic quest for a famished fox whose decline is mirrored in the disease of a small child. A Russian farmer plants a forest with fish and a river with sausages. A butterfly crawls from the lips of an Irish shepherd and embarks upon an odyssey that will remind some readers of the journey of the ant in the Japanese tale of the Dream of Akinosuke. This is a wonderful little collection for sharing aloud or reading alone, and it should please all ages and abilities; each of the stories is short but strange, and rich in resonances with other tales. Sharkey's illustrations are schematic but wonderfully playful.