Overview
A gift from a wizard makes Jack's fortune grow by ones and twos, then threes and fours, then faster and faster, challenging you to keep track of his riches.
The reader is asked to perform a series of mathematical operations integrated into the story of a lazy man who plants magic seeds and reaps an increasingly abundant harvest.
Synopsis
A gift from a wizard makes Jack's fortune grow by ones and twos, then threes and fours, then faster and faster, challenging you to keep track of his riches.
"The real wizard is the renowned Japanese author and illustrator, who has found yet another way to introduce numbers and counting with wit and charm...Endlessly rewarding." --The New York Times Book Review
"Children old enough to enjoy brain teasers will have fun working this out." --Kirkus Reviews, pointer review
"A tour de force from a most original author-illustrator." --The Horn Book
Publishers Weekly
Anno (Anno's Mysterious Multiplying Jug; Anno's Hat Tricks) offers another worthy addition to his collection of playful stories with mathematical themes. A brief prelude tells of a wizard who gives happy-go-lucky Jack two golden seeds and directs him to eat one and bury the other: "I promise you it will grow and give you 2 more magic seeds in the fall." Jack does as he is told, and the cycle repeats for a number of years, until Jack decides one fall to bury both seeds. As Jack buries more and more seeds each consecutive year, readers are challenged with a series of questions ("How many seeds grew that year?"; "How many seeds did they bury?"). The mathematical gymnastics become even more rigorous as Jack marries, has a child, begins to store some seeds and sell others... until a hurricane wipes out the crops and Jack must begin all over again. Kids on the older end of the targeted age span will have fun with this, and although the arithmetic is well beyond those on the younger end, they'll enjoy Anno's lilting, linear narrative-as well as his soft, appealingly primitive watercolors. Ages 3-7. (Feb.)