Texas Zeke and The Longhorn
PreSchool-Grade 3–A gentle version of The Old Woman and Her Pig, set in Texas. Old Zeke buys an ornery longhorn steer that balks at being corralled, and the frustrated cowboy wont get home for chili until the job is done. When he requests help from a collie and is refused, he asks a mesquite stick to poke the dog, and so it goes. Davis features a tenderhearted, politically correct protagonist. Zeke mildly presents a bluebonnet flower to a mockingbird that sings to a lovely cowgirl, who kisses a cowboy, who chases an armadillo, and so on, until the steer is finally put away. The straightforward language rolls off the storytellers tongue, but the narrative suffers from being scrunched up in paragraphs that get longer and longer. The tightly arranged text blocks look wrong on spreads that depict the open Texas landscape. Still, the colorful cartoon illustrations cleverly convey the action and are filled with humor. The keen combination of art and story is further enhanced by endpapers that map out the events in simple line drawings that will encourage retellings. Altogether, this softer interpretation of the folktale will fit in with current sensibilities.–Nancy Call, Santa Cruz Public Libraries, Aptos, CACopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.