The Featherless Chicken
Kindergarten-Grade 3–With the same gentle humor and sensitivity to children that she showed inGuji Guji(Kane/Miller, 2004), Chen introduces a young featherless chicken. Not only does this poor creature get cold when the wind blows, but he's also afflicted with miserable allergies. One day, he sees four beautifully feathered chickens on their way to go boating. He asks if he can join them, but they shun his unadorned looks. Then, thanks to a muddy puddle, bits of this and that, and a jaunty tin-can hat, he is transformed into a beautifully adorned fowl, and the others invite him to come along. During a flap about which chicken is the most handsome, the newly fancy fellow lets out a terrible sneeze, and the boat capsizes. The dunking leaves all five chickens featherless and frolicking together. The chickens' comic expressions and their colorful feathers are perfectly rendered in Chen's soft palate of earth tones and subtle splashes of color on thick, creamy paper. The text is set in a typewriterlike font that adds to the style and overall charm of this memorable outing.–Genevieve Gallagher, Murray Elementary School, Charlottesville, VACopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.