Discover the Night Sky by Chris Madsen and Michele Claiborne, 1989.
I bought this book at a school book fair when I was a kid, and it was my favorite book about the stars and outer space because it has glow-in-the-dark pictures. As a child, I loved anything that was glow-in-the-dark. Actually, I still do.
Every page in the book is designed to be interactive. There are pages that talk about different aspects of outer space, but the pages with the glow-in-the-dark pictures want you to guess what’s in the picture based on descriptions of it. Then, you’re supposed to turn off the light and look at the glowing picture to see what it is. You can see the what the glow-in-the-dark picture is without turning off the lights if you tilt the book and look at it at an angle or use a black light (like I did to take the pictures), but it is more fun if you really do look at it while it’s glowing in the dark. (Like other glow-in-the-dark toys, it glows better if the page has been in the light first to charge it.)
The pages after each glow-in-the-dark page have facts about the object in the glow-in-the-dark picture and an experiment for readers to do. The experiments help demonstrate the nature of the moon, stars, and planets, like what causes the phases of the moon, what causes seasons on Earth, and why you don’t see the stars during the day, even though they’re still there.
The information in the book is still factually correct, although it shows Pluto as being the last planet of the solar system. (Since people still quibble about this, I don’t consider it a big issue.) It isn’t a bad introduction to outer space for young children. The last page in the book is about the Voyager 2 space probe. Its primary mission ended around the time the book was first published, but we have contact with the space probe today (as of early 2021).
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. The online version of the book doesn’t fully do it justice because you can’t take advantage of the glow-in-the-dark feature, but you can still read the text and see the experiment pages.
Somewhere in Africa by Ingrid Mennen and Niki Daly, illustrated by Nicolaas Maritz, 1990.
I didn’t read this book when I was a child, although it’s old enough that I could have, but I was fascinated when I found it in a Little Free Library because this is an American edition of a book that was originally from South Africa. I enjoyed the colorful painted pictures, and I think it’s a good book for explaining to American children what it would be like to be a kid in South Africa. For a child living in a city, life actually wouldn’t be too different from the lives of American children living in cities. Africa isn’t all savannas and animal safaris.
A boy named Ashraf lives in Africa. He doesn’t live in a place with lions, crocodiles, and zebras, though. He lives in a very busy city. Ashraf likes animals, and he reads about them in his favorite library book.
As Ashraf goes to the library, he sees all of the busy traffic of the city and passes by shops with fascinating things in their windows. In the market, there is a fruit seller singing about his products. Other people are selling flowers, and there are street musicians.
When Ashraf gets to the library, he checks out the same book about African animals again.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
Dancing with the Indians by Angela Shelf Medearis, illustrated by Samuel Byrd, 1991.
I love books with historical background, and this is a fascinating picture book that is based on the history of the author’s family. Like the author’s earlier book, Picking Peas for a Penny, it is told in rhyme, from the point of view of the author’s mother as a child in Oklahoma during the 1930s.
The girl and her brother are going with their parents to visit the Seminole American Indians. As they travel in their wagon, the parents explain to the children the history of their family. Many years before, the girl’s grandfather (the author’s great-grandfather) escaped from slavery and ran away to Oklahoma, where he was accepted by the Seminole tribe. Ever since, his descendants have continued to visit the tribe and join in Seminole celebrations and ceremonies as part of their extended family.
The night is an exciting celebration with dancing, drumming, and songs and stories of past triumphs.
They all dance and celebrate through the entire night, until morning. As the family returns home to tend to their farm, the father promises them that they’ll return to dance with the Indians again.
I liked this book because it explains an aspect of American history that I don’t remember being discussed much when I was in school. In fact, I think that the first time I saw anything that explained that escaping slaves sometimes headed west instead of north before the Civil War was in a Disney Adventures magazine, where they were talking about cowboy, specifically mentioning black cowboys. However, another option was for escaped slaves to join up with Native American tribes. The Seminole tribe of Florida and Oklahoma was one group that was known to accept escaped slaves and adopt them into the tribe, starting in the early 1700s continuing into the 1850s. Some of the escaped slaves married into the tribe. The African Americans who joined the Seminoles and their descendants came to be called Black Seminoles. Parts of the two cultures intermingled. Black Seminoles adopted Seminole traditions, and they also introduced Seminoles to aspects of their traditions. The relationship has had complications as well, and even in modern times, there are debates about how much Black Seminoles count as part of the tribe and how much they should be entitled to certain benefits
Picking Peas for a Penny by Angela Shelf Medearis, drawings by Charles Shaw, 1990.
This picture book is based on stories from the author’s family and is told from the point of view of her mother, when she was a child in Oklahoma in the 1930s. The story is told in rhyme with a kind of sing-song counting from one to ten as they pick peas and put them in their baskets.
The 1930s was the time of the Great Depression. Many people were out of work, but this African American family has a farm and makes money by growing and harvesting crops. It doesn’t pay much, and everyone needs to help, but because times are hard, they are glad that they are able to do the work and earn the money.
It’s hard work that takes all day in the hot sun, but the girl telling the story says that she and her brother have a little fun while they’re doing it, too. Their grandmother tells them not to goof off because they work to finish. The grandfather of the family offers the children a penny for every pound of peas they pick and says that he’ll take them into town to spend it, so the children start a pea-picking race with each other.
After the work is done, they visit the general store in town, and the children have the opportunity to buy treats for themselves. They only have pennies, but it’s enough to buy some penny candy and soda pop. After the hard work they’ve done, it feels like a rich reward.
In the back of the book, there’s a picture of the author’s family. Although the story itself doesn’t mention it, the name of the girl in the story is Angeline.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
The Twelve Dancing Princesses retold and illustrated by Ruth Sanderson, 1990.
This is a retelling of the classic German fairy tale collected and published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. There are various retellings of this story, some changing the number of princesses and some giving the characters different names. This one is actually closer to the Andrew Lang version from The Red Fairy Book, published in 1890.
A king with twelve daughters has a strange mystery to solve. All twelve of his daughters sleep in the same room every night. The door to their room is always locked, but every morning, the girls’ shoes are completely worn out, like they’ve been dancing all night. The girls claim that all they do at night is sleep, but that doesn’t explain what happened to their shoes.
The king is confused and troubled by this odd mystery, so he promises the hand of one of his daughters in marriage to the man who can solve the mystery. A series of princes attempt to solve the mystery by sleeping in a room next to the princesses, but in the morning, each of the princes has mysteriously disappeared and the princesses’ shoes are still worn out.
With the mystery getting more mysterious and more urgent, with the princes’ disappearances, a commoner named Michael decides that he wants to try to solve the mystery. A woman Michael meets recommends that he take a job as a gardener’s helper at the castle and see if he can spot something that would give him a hint. The mysterious woman gives Michael a cloak that will make him invisible so that he can follow the princesses and see what they do.
Michael first meets the princesses when the gardener sends him to give a bouquet of flowers to each of them. He catches the attention of the youngest princess, Lina. Lina’s sisters tease her about admiring a simple garden boy, but Michael also likes Lina.
Because he is a commoner, Michael doesn’t think that he can go the king directly and ask to investigate the mystery of the princesses, so he decides to use his magic cloak to spy on them secretly. When he’s invisible, he slip into their room before the princesses are locked in for the night and hides. After everyone thinks that the princesses have gone to bed, they get dressed as if they’re going to a dance, putting on their new dancing shoes. The eldest princess opens a special trap door in the floor, and they all leave secretly, with Michael following them.
Michael follows the princesses through magical woods to a lake where the captive, now enchanted, princes wait to take the princesses to a magical palace in boats shaped like swans. There, the princesses dance with the princes all night, wearing their shoes to pieces.
Lina suspects that someone followed them because Michael accidentally stepped on her skirt a couple of times, and Michael confirms her suspicion when he places a branch from the magical woods into her bouquet of flowers. At first, Lina tries to bribe Michael into keeping their secret by offering him money, but he refuses. She asks him if he plans to tell the king and collect his reward by marrying one of the princesses, but Michael says he won’t. Lina tries to ask him why, but he doesn’t want to answer. The truth is that Michael loves Lina and doesn’t want to get her into trouble or force her to marry him if she doesn’t return his affections.
Eventually, Lina tells her eldest sister, the one who is controlling all of the magic behind their escapades, about Michael and what he knows. Lina’s sisters want to have Michael thrown in the dungeon to keep him quiet, but Lina is horrified and says that if they do that, she’ll tell their father the truth herself. Instead, they decide to openly invite him to their next dance and offer him the magical drink that would enchant him like they did with all of the other princes. Michael overhears their plan and decides that he will see if Lina really loves him. If can’t appeal to her heart, he’ll drink the drink and be enchanted.
When Lina prevents Michael from drinking the enchanted drink at the dance because she loves him and can’t stand to see him turned into a mindless magical slave, the spell is broken on all of the other princes. They all return to the castle, and the magical palace crumbles behind them. When they reveal the truth to the king, he makes Michael the heir to the kingdom with Lina as his wife.
I’ve heard many different versions of this story before, but there are always so many unanswered questions. Just how did the eldest princess come up with this whole magical dancing scheme in the first place? Where did she even learn to do magic? How come the princesses are never tired even though they dance every night instead of sleeping? (Well, I guess that could just be magic because magic can fill many plot holes.) Why did the king just keep giving the girls new dancing shoes when they kept wearing them out every night? My parents would have just stopped giving me things that I repeatedly broke, telling me that I can’t have new stuff if I can’t take care of the old. They’d probably say something like, “I don’t know what you’re doing with those shoes every night, but whatever it is, you’re not going to do it anymore because you won’t have them.” But, fairy tale characters just aren’t that practical, and if they were, the story would have ended much sooner. In fact, why didn’t the king himself just sit up for one night with his daughters and see for himself what they did or split them up and put them in different rooms of his castle to put an end to their hijinks? Just what is the king going to do with the eldest princess, now that he knows that she’s some kind of witch or enchantress? Did her powers break completely when Michael broke her spell? Also, what was the deal with the mysterious woman Michael met on the road, who gave him the invisibility cloak? How did she figure into this, or was she just some random, magical being or enchantress who, coincidentally, just happened to have a magical cloak that she could spare? The story doesn’t really say.
I love the pictures in this book because they are beautiful and detailed, but the art style is a little unusual. Instead of having every picture appear in its entirety on a page, some pictures wrap around to the next page, either giving a hint of what’s coming or a taste of what was on the previous page. Sometimes, I found myself wanting to see the whole picture at once, but I can see how the illustrator was trying to make scenes in the story kind of flow into each other.
The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.
Peter and the Wolf by Walt Disney Productions, 1974.
This is the picture book version of Disney’s cartoon from 1946 based on Peter and the Wolf, which was originally a musical symphony for children, written by Sergei Prokofiev in 1936 for the Central Children’s Theatre in Moscow.
Young Peter lives with his grandfather near a forest in Russia. Peter’s grandfather warns him to stay away from the forest because there are hungry wolves there, but Peter thinks that he can catch a wolf himself. One day, while his grandfather is asleep, Peter sneaks out of the house to go catch a wolf.
Along the way, Peter’s friend, Sasha the bird, also warns him that there really are dangerous wolves in the woods and that he can’t hope to catch one with his toy gun. Peter insists that he’s going to try anyway, and Sasha says he’ll go along and help.
As they venture further, they are also joined by Sonia the duck. Ivan the cat tries to eat Sasha, but Peter makes him let Sasha go. Then, suddenly, a wolf appears!
The wolf chases Sonia, and at first, the others think he actually caught and ate her. They manage to catch the wolf by the tail. Sasha attracts some help from some passing hunters.
At first, the hunters want to shoot the wolf, but Peter asks them to take the wolf to the zoo instead, realizing that the wolf was just hungry. It tuns out that Sonia is safe after all, and they all take the wolf to show Peter’s grandfather.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
This is a retelling of a traditional folktale, sometimes called Button Soup and sometimes Stone Soup. The basic story is the same, but sometimes, it uses a stone and sometimes a button. All of the characters in this particular version of the story are represented by Disney characters.
Scrooge McDuck’s niece, Daisy, is coming to visit him. The Sheriff welcomes her when her stagecoach comes into town, but seeing how tired and hungry she is, he warns her that she’s not going to find much comfort at her uncle’s house because Scrooge is stingy. However, Daisy says that she is sure she can handle Uncle Scrooge.
When she gets to Scrooge’s house, he’s not happy to see what he has unexpected company and tries to deny that he has any food to share. Daisy knows that Scrooge isn’t really that poor, so she takes out a big pot and begins making soup. Scrooge asks her what she’s planning to cook without food, and Daisy claims that she can make a whole pot of soup with just one button.
Scrooge is curious to see what Daisy’s button soup is like, so when she asks him for a little salt and pepper, he gives it to her. Then, she says that she once made the soup with an old soup bone, and Scrooge gives her a soup bone, too.
Each time that Daisy suggests another ingredient, Scrooge rushes to get it for her, eager to see what Daisy will do with the soup, which smells better and better as they go. (The pictures also show just how much food Scrooge is hiding. In reality, most of that would spoil before he could use it all, since he’s only feeding himself.)
When the soup is ready, Daisy points out that there is more than they’ll ever eat, so they should invite some other people to share it. Scrooge wants to save the soup in jars instead, but Daisy points out that it’s easy to make more because they did it with just one button.
They end up inviting the whole town to share the soup, and Scrooge is pleased that he has such a clever niece.
This book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive along with other versions of the story.
Stone Soup retold by Marilyn Sapienza, illustrations by Hans Wilhelm, 1986.
This is a retelling of a traditional folktale, sometimes called Stone Soup and sometimes Button Soup (and other names). The basic story is the same, but sometimes, it uses a stone and sometimes a button. All of the characters in this particular version of the story are represented by animals. Some of the pictures are in color, and some are black-and-white.
Max and Molly are backpacking across country, and they are getting tired and hungry when they spot a village. Hoping to get something to eat there, they decide to approach the villagers and ask for food.
However, the villagers are not friendly, and the last thing they want is to share their food or anything else with strangers. As soon as they see Max and Molly coming, they quickly hide their food and anything else the travelers might want them to share. (I’m not sure why the innkeeper closes his hotel as soon as he sees potential customers coming. You can’t stay in the hospitality industry very long like that.)
When Molly and Max get into town, all of the villagers pretend like they’re starving and refuse to help Molly and Max. However, they see through the villagers’ act and come up with a plan of their own.
They ring the village bell to call of the people in the village. At first, the villagers are irritated because the bell is only for use in emergencies, but Molly and Max say that having no food is an emergency and that they have a plan to solve it. They are going to teach the villagers to make Stone Soup.
The villagers say that they’ve never heard of Stone Soup, and Molly says that it’s a secret recipe that she’s willing to share. It starts with a pot of hot water and some stones. Molly makes a show of tasting the “soup” and says that it’s good, but it’s even better if you make “the fancy kind.”
When the villagers ask how to make the fancy kind, she asks for some salt, pepper, and herbs. After the mayor’s wife supplies those, Molly asks for some carrots and onions. When she says that she supposes that they’ll have to do without them, the farmer’s wife steps up and offers some.
Little by little, Molly and Max coax the villagers into supplying other ingredients, almost without realizing what they’re doing. In the end, the Mayor of the village says that it’s the best soup he’s ever tasted, and it’s amazing, considering that it was only made with stones and water.
The moral of the story is that everyone benefits when people are wiling to share. Everyone gets a share of the soup, but when they start serving it, the villagers also provide other food to eat alongside it, and they all have a feast. The innkeeper gives Molly and Max a room for the night, and when they leave in the morning, they remind the villagers to “Share Stone Soup with everyone.”
In the back of the book, there is the complete recipe for Stone Soup, with rhyming steps. It doesn’t have details, like amounts and cooking times and temperatures, but I suppose someone could use these general guidelines to make an improvised soup. Really, I think the meat should be precooked if you’re adding it as a final ingredient. Otherwise, the veggies would be overdone before the meat is fully cooked.
There are many different versions of this story that have been made into picture books. I haven’t been able to find a copy of this particular book available to read online, but you can find various versions other versions of the same story online through Internet Archive.
The Elves and the Shoemaker story adapted by Lucy Kincaid, illustrated by Gillian Embleton, 1981.
I loved to read this folktale when I was a kid! This particular copy was made specifically for beginning readers with large type and a section in the back that shows key words in the story with little pictures to explain what they mean. Aside from my nostalgic associations with this book, I also really enjoy the detailed, realistic pictures.
There was a shoemaker who worked very hard but never seemed to get much money for the shoes he made. He and his wife are on the verge of starvation, and he only has enough leather to make one final pair of shoes.
Before going to bed, he cuts out the leather for the last pair of shoes, planning to sew them in the morning. However, in the morning, he discovers that someone else has already sewn the shoes together, and the shoes are very fine quality. The shoemaker has no idea who finished the shoes for him, but they did an excellent job, and he is able to sell them for enough money to buy food and enough leather for two more pairs of shoes.
Once again, he cuts out the leather for the shoes, and again, in the morning, he discovers that someone else has sewn the shoes together. The shoes are excellent, and he is able to sell them for enough to buy leather for four more pairs.
This continues night after night, and the shoemaker’s business begins to prosper, but he and his wife wonder who is helping them. One night, they hide and watch to see who will come to do the sewing. As they sit up, waiting, they see a pair of small elves who enter through the window and begin sewing the shoes together.
The shoemaker and his wife want to thank the elves for their help. Noticing that the elves are wearing ragged clothes and have no shoes of their own, they decide to make the elves their own sets of clothes and shoes.
On Christmas Eve, they put the elves’ new clothes on the table where the shoemaker usually puts the shoes that need to be cut and watch to see what the elves do. The elves are overjoyed to see the new clothes, realizing that they are presents for them. They immediately put the clothes on and dance around with happiness, singing that they don’t need to work anymore.
That is the last time the shoemaker and his wife see the elves, but the shoemaker’s business continues to prosper.
In the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling used the device of gifts of clothing ending a house elf’s service to a particular household, but she didn’t invent that concept. It was already a feature of folktales like The Elves and the Shoemaker, which was one of the folk tales collected by the Brothers Grimm.
This book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. There are also many other versions of the same story.
Mother Goose Rhymes, illustrated by Eulalie, 1950-1953.
This was one of my first books of rhymes and poems as a child. We’ve had this book for as long as I can remember. I always loved the illustrations in the book, which are realistic in style, and like the illustrations in old Kate Greenaway books from the late 19th century, showing children in clothes that would be appropriate for the early 19th century, with high waists and short jackets. I suspect that Kate Greenaway’s work may have been some of the inspiration for the illustrations in this book. Some of the illustrations are small ones that appear in corners of the pages, surrounded by the text of the rhymes. Other illustrations take up a full page. All of them are full color illustrations.
People can recite popular nursery rhymes like Mary Had a Little Lamb, Old Mother Hubbard, Little Bo-Peep, and Lucy Locket from memory because many of us heard and memorized them early in life. But, since we’re on the subject, who is/was Mother Goose and what are these rhymes about really?
Mother Goose rhyme books don’t really have an author because the rhymes are short little folk poems with no known original author. When an “author” is credited for a collection, they are credited as being “collectors” of the rhymes included, not as the original creators of those rhymes. The first person to collect and describe folk and fairy tales as being “Mother Goose” stories was the French author and folk tale collector Charles Perrault. In 1697, he published a collection of stories called Stories or Tales from Past Times, with Morals or Mother Goose Tales. It isn’t completely clear how many of the stories in this book were completely Perrault’s own creation, based on common themes often found in folk and fairy tales, and how many were stories he collected from other sources and modified to fit his style and purpose. The stories included in this original Mother Goose book included many fairy tales that are now childhood classics, like Cinderella, The Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Little Red Riding Hood, and the scary Bluebeard. This collection of stories was not meant for children. The stories were intended for adults because fairy tales were in fashion among the aristocratic literary circles in Paris at the time the book was published. The exact reasons why Perrault decided to use the imaginary “Mother Goose” as the supposed source of these stories or even who “Mother Goose” once was are uncertain. American legend sometimes cites “Mother Goose” as being the wife of Isaac Goose and the mother Elizabeth Goose, who lived in Boston in the 17th century and told stories and sang songs to her (a story referenced in The Only True Mother Goose Melodies published in Boston in 1833), but it’s unlikely that Perrault was referencing her. A more likely theory is that “Mother Goose” was a reference to a somewhat forgotten figure of French folklore who would have been more familiar to people living in the late 17th century who studied folk and fairy tales. There was a French legend from the Middle Ages about a queen who told stories that amazed children and was sometimes called “goose-footed”, and possibly, this story or a similar figure from French history or legend became known as “Mother Goose.”
In the 18th century, Perrault’s book was translated into English, and English authors began putting together their own “Mother Goose” books that included English nursery rhymes. The book that shifted the association of “Mother Goose” from stories to rhymes was Mother Goose’s Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle, a collection of English nursery rhymes published by John Newbery, a famous English publisher of children’s literature in the 18th century who was nicknamed “The Father of Children’s Literature” and who would later become the namesake of the Newbery Medal for excellence in American children’s literature. Mother Goose’s Melody popularized the association of “Mother Goose” with children’s nursery rhymes in both England and America, and ever since, it has been used in the title of collections of nursery rhymes. Many of the popular Mother Goose rhymes are centuries-old ones from England, although some later classics, like Mary Had a Little Lamb, were added to American books of nursery rhymes in the 19th century.
But, what do these rhymes mean, or do they mean anything? Are they just nonsense rhymes for children about things like a cow jumping over the moon or a boy and girl falling down the hill, or is there some additional meaning behind these rhymes that have kept them in the public consciousness for so many centuries? The exact origins as well as the original authors of many old nursery rhymes have been lost to time, but there are indications that various nursery rhymes may have begun as folk songs or rhymes referencing current events that were happening at the time they were originally composed. Although they sound like harmless and innocent nonsense, people who heard them at the time when they were first composed would have recognized references or pieces of dark humor about real events or scandals that were public knowledge. In modern times, there is some debate about the exact meaning behind some of these rhymes because, while the references in the rhymes may have seemed clever and humorous to people at the time of their creation, they are too esoteric for modern people, who are centuries removed from the events they were referencing. For generations, people passed on the rhymes to their children but not the explanations of their meaning, so most were simply forgotten. However, there are articles that you can about The history lessons that may be hidden in nursery rhymes and The Dark Side of Nursery Rhymes, which discuss what we know about the creation of these nursery rhymes and theories about their original meanings. Sometimes, there are multiple theories about certain rhymes because there just isn’t enough evidence to firmly settle on one, and also, it’s possible that rhymes could be inspired and shaped by more than one event or source.
This particular book of Mother Goose Rhymes is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. However, there are also many other books of Mother Goose rhymes available through Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg, including Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 