The Little Book of Animal Stories
Part II
These stories are an excellent means of teaching young children how they should aspire to act.
Michelle Chin and Rachel Foo return with the second in their animal stories picture book series, The Little Book of Animal Stories, Part II.
Chin offers three short stories, featuring an envious goat (“The Goat That Wanted What Others Had”), a greedy pig (“The Pig That Always Wanted More”), and an angry rabbit (“The Rabbit That Got Angry All the Time”). Each story delivers a moral, in the style of Aesop’s Fables.
While it’s structured in much the same way as The Little Book of Animal Stories, Part I, Part II falls a bit short of its predecessor. While both books feature cute, well-composed rhyming verses, there are a number of couplets in Part II that contain lines of different lengths or off-rhymes, throwing off the reading rhythm, as in the beginning of “The Goat That Wanted What Others Had”: “An envious goat lived on a farm / that he shared with the animals living in the barn.”
The stories, while charming and with valuable lessons, keep it basic. The rabbit, for example, is mean to everyone until a fox takes exception and bites him. The moral? “We should learn to keep our feelings in check / Fools vent their anger, but the wise hold it back.”
Foo’s illustrations are fun, colorful, and consistent, with facial expressions on the animals that match and enhance the text perfectly. Pictures are so expressive that these stories might work nearly as well without the accompanying text.
The Little Book of Animal Stories, Part II is an enjoyable read and an excellent means by which to teach young children how they should aspire to act—by showing them the consequences of unseemly behavior, through the eyes of animals.
Reviewed by
Peter Dabbene
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
