My Father's Shop
K-Gr. 2. A small Morrocan boy named Mustafa falls in love with a rug in his father's shop and gets to keep it because it has a hole. Delirious with possession, he runs through the marketplace with his brightly colored acquisition over his head and attracts the attention of a wandering rooster, who thinks it's found a compatriot. "Kho kho hou houuu," cries the rooster. The many tourists in the market exclaim over the rooster and the boy, each citing how roosters sound in their own countries: "qui-qui-ri-qui" in Spain; "cock-a-doodle-doo" in England; "koke-ko-kooo" in Japan. Mustafa runs back to his father's shop to report proudly that he has learned to speak "rooster" in five languages--and brings the tourist trade along with him. Besides a gentle cultural lesson in how animals sound in different countries, Ichikawa's glowing pictures, with their radiant colors and slightly exaggerated forms, present an engaging image of a Moroccan marketplace and of a boy who can find a dozen ways of playing with a rug with a small hole.GraceAnne DeCandidoCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved