The Three Billy Goats Gruff
PreSchool-Grade 1AA familiar tale, simply told. The straightforward style and repetition of phrases in the text are so accessible that very young listeners will soon be chanting along. Carpenter's cheery billy goats and their country setting look a little bit like the frolicking sheep and rolling hills featured in Jez Alborough's The Grass Is Always Greener (Dial, 1987; o.p.) while the troll is appropriately ugly but not too scary. The colorful cartoons mirror the story's action rather than extend or comment on it. This title won't replace Glen Round's appealingly scruffy and slightly scarier version (Holiday, 1993) nor is it a match for Janet Stevens's more elaborate and amusingly updated retelling (Harcourt, 1990). It will come in handy, however, as an additional copy of a perennially popular folktale. (One minor quibble about the format: the final double-page spread occurs on the endpages, which may affect some library's processing routines.)ALisa Dennis, The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, PACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.