Description:
“In the bare bones beginning, Armadillo’s ears were tall as a jack rabbit’s and wide as a steer’s horns.” With such wonderful ears, Armadillo loved nothing better than spying on other animals and telling tales about what he heard. Then Armadillo gets an earful all his very own.
This humorous tale is a lyrical lesson in just how fast stretching the truth is likely to cause one humongous armadillo ruckus. As Armadillo peeps and creeps, children will giggle, and also learn a basic lesson in thoughtfulness and respect.
Beanie is called too young for corn planting. Grandpa is call too old. So they’re sharing a back step, and a sigh, and…a story. It’s a wild one, sure to cheer anybody up, about Indiana in 1928, “the year of no more corn,” when the rains came and floated half the people in the state over into Ohio. “A bunch of them still live there to this day.” “Is that right, Old Grandpa?” You bet and that’s just the beginning of a yarn taller than corn itself, about rain and wind and blazing sun, about fish and chickens and fat, fat crows, and about what happened next.
They laid in the fields and pecked until they had eaten every last kernel. Why, those crows got so fat they couldn't fly away. they had to walk! It sure was a sight, Bennie boy. Looked like the whole earth had turned black and was moving in waves. It made me seasick.
* Bank Street Writer’s Children’s Book Of The Year. 1993
* New York Public Libraries Best 100 Picture Books, 1993
Reviews
“The storytelling is as smooth and straight facedly funny as the pen-and-wash art. it’s a collaboration kids will take to like crows to corn.”
* * * Starred Review from BCCB, 9/93
“With its well-written text and accessible story and artwork, this would be a good choice to read aloud, even to somewhat older children studying tall tales.”
Booklist, 9/93
When Beanie complains that “Dad says I’m too young to help” plant corn, Grandpa allows that “that’s funny, because he said I’m too old”–and wisely seizes the opportunity to describe the spring of 1928, when his successive plantings were destroyed by a string of disasters rivaling the plagues of Egypt: floods, wind, crows, a sun so hot the hens laid hard-boiled eggs and the corn popped. With the seed corn exhausted, Grandpa says, he whittled a wooden ear (like the one he’s making now), planted the kernels, and grew an extraordinary, never-to-be-duplicated crop of corn-laden trees. Ketteman’s wry, folksy telling of her original tale is colorful and well paced. Parker’s elegantly scribbled pen drawings are drenched in the sunny colors of the Midwest; the tender scenes of the boy and the old man together are especially lovely. A lively, likable tall tale. (Picture book. 4-8) — Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved
From Kirkus Reviews
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