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Overview
This lively collection comes from West Africa, a place "where stories grow on trees." Here are the famous tricksters: Hare, Tortoise, and the greatest of them all—Ananse the spider. The stories are full of larger-than-life characters and situations, and include the tale of how Ananse got his thin waist, how Crocodile learnt his lesson, and how Monkey managed not to get eaten by Shark.
Editorials
School Library Journal
Gr 4-6-A collection of 13 trickster tales, unsuccessfully adapted and retold to reflect modern culture and language and western lifestyles. In ``A Debt Made Profit,'' Bennett's phrasing, ``Bang! Bang! Bang! Again came Monkey's knocks, like a machine gun,'' is used to give emphasis to the intensity of the knock. Monkey's level of anger is emphasized with the line ``If he had been a bomb, he would have exploded on the spot.'' In ``Wind and Stick Land Leuk the Hare Some Blows,'' blows fall ``...one after the other just like in a kung-fu film'' and ``Wind drove past in his air bus, Zephyr 504 GL with built-in air-conditioning.'' Bennett's creative use of language to retell traditional West African folklore compromises the cultural purpose and period of the original tellings.-Barbara Osborne Williams, Queens Borough Public Library, Jamaica, NYBook Details
Published
December 1, 1994
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Pages
128
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780192741721