Beautiful book about telling stories ( )

I love the Pamela Zagarenski's illustrations. They are beautiful and playful. And this story about a little girl and the magic of stories is lovely. You can read the story or do as the little girl and create your own with these wonderful illustrations!

Pictures are stories and stories are magic! ( )

Not a traditional story book, which might frustrate some. A little girl borrows a book of stories from her teacher, but the words fall out on her way home. She loves the beautiful pictures but is discouraged until a voice whispers that she can make up her own stories to go with them. As she studies the pictures again (we see her in the corner of each spread and can see that the pictures she's looking at are the same ones we're seeing), she creates a title and a sentence or two to begin. Each sentence trails off...leaving an opportunity for the reader/child being read to to continue the tale. The girl falls asleep imagining stories and is late for school...but when a kind fox returns the lost words, the girl agrees to help her get reach some grapes before going on to tell the teacher all the stories she's invented. On the last page is a very short retelling of Aesop's "The Fox and the Grapes" (the origin of the fox in our book), in which the clever fox, instead of giving up and grumbling, imagines a different story for herself.

Beautifully illustrated (because I am nothing if not shallow about my picture books) and with plenty of excellent opportunities for children to stretch their imaginations! ( )

Extraordinary images and a very imaginative story to go with it. Beautiful, mysterious, requires the reader to tell the story. ( )

An illustrated fable about imagination and stories. The pretty art is collage like and idiosyncratic but I wasn't totally charmed and I found the ubiquity of crowns odd and distracting. ( )