Tomie dePaola's Favorite Nursery Tales
PreSchool-Grade 4 Like a good winter coat in a large family, this anthology can be passed along to many children. The smallest can listen to ``The Three Bears,'' the middle-sized ones will enjoy ``The Owl and the Pussycat,'' and the older ones will puzzle out ``Rumpelstiltskin.'' Jacobs, Andersen, and Grimm account for most of the selections, and there are a few poems, too. The only off note is Longfellow's ``The Children's Hour,'' which is so much more sentimental than the other selections. Fans of Rojankovsky's Tall Book of Nursery Tales (Harper, 1944) and of Anne Rockwell's The Three Bears and Fifteen Other Stories (Crowell, 1975) are sure to love this one. DePaola's droll, witty, and very funny illustrations capture the essence of each story from a child's point of view. It's unlikely that any adult will get away with reading just one of these selections for a bedtime story. The cover and title page show a child reading aloud to an attentive audience and are an immediate reminder that this book is for sharing. The beautiful layout of these pages, in which the print and pictures are perfectly at ease with one another, invites confident new readers as well as adults for reading aloud. A fine companion volume to Tomie dePaola's Mother Goose (Putnam, 1985) .Anna Biagioni Hart, Sherwood Regional Library, Alexandria, Va.Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.