Sindbad's Secret: From the Tales of the Thousand and One Nights
Grade 2-5-Combining incidents from the fifth and seventh voyages of the fabled merchant adventurer, Zeman concludes her trilogy of picture books. In Sindbad (1999) and Sindbad in the Land of Giants (2001, both Tundra), the intrepid seaman, armed with wit and bravery, survived terrifying monsters, endured lethal hardships, and returned to Baghdad with great wealth. Telling his last story to an impoverished porter, also named Sindbad, he now promises to reveal his greatest secret. He describes his escape from giant sea serpents and the murderous Old Man of the Sea, and his enslavement by ivory hunters who forced him to slaughter elephants. He spared a baby, and to reward him, the mother showed him an elephant graveyard, surely a lifetime supply of ivory. Yet his greatest treasure turns out to be the slave girl the elephant helped him rescue, now his beloved wife and the mother of his children. In order to fit Sindbad's adventures into a picture-book format, Zeman considerably shortened the leisurely retellings found in Andrew Lang's The Arabian Nights Entertainments (Dover, 1969) or Kate D. Wiggin and Nora A. Smith's volume, The Arabian Nights: Their Best-Known Tales (Scribner, 1993), and certainly modified the adult version by Richard Francis Burton. She shapes her retelling to accommodate modern sensibilities, softening Sindbad's character. A frontispiece map traces the sailor's voyages. Zeman's richly colored illustrations, detailed, coherent, and carefully composed, and reminiscent of Persian miniatures with their intricate borders, create an enticing introduction to a collection of tales that inspired writers from Hans Christian Andersen to Robert Louis Stevenson.Margaret A. Chang, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, North AdamsCopyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.