This is one of my children's favorite books! A grandmother tells her grandchildren three stories as the day winds down into evening. The stories are quiet and gentle, and engage the imagination. I myself have always been fascinated with the miniature, and this book gives plenty of opportunities to enjoy small things in the illustrations. This is a storybook for calm down time, with a simple narrative about the adventures the children might have if they lived on the back of a snail. I enjoyed the way the siblings interacted together as a family. They are not exciting adventure stories at all, but fun and pleasant to read. ( )

A grandmother tells a story of a family who get so small they can live in a snail house. This story was quite boring and I don't see myself using it for anything. ( )

Tyler's (The Good Little Christmas Tree) paneled, watercolor and pen-and-ink pictures in miniature play a pivotal role in revealing the engaging action in this creatively designed, horizontal volume. Small-scaled, wispy and finely detailed, her art bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the late Janet Ahlberg. In his story within a story, author Ahlberg introduces a brother and sister who climb into their grandmother's ample lap while their baby brother dozes in a stroller. The woman tells them about three siblings portrayed in the pictures as their look-alikes who one day shrink to a tiny size and take up residence in a snail's shell: "It was a proper house too, with a door and windows, roof and chimney, table, chairs, three little beds, curtains, and crockery everything!" Side panels show the siblings battling bugs with a broomstick and hanging laundry on a line fixed between the snail's feelers. As the children eagerly interrupt their grandmother to comment on her tale, the nimble, conversational narrative describes a trio of adventures that the children embark upon before bidding farewell to their snail. Ahlberg again displays his gift for storytelling in a work that will surely set young imaginations loose and may well colour the way readers view diminutive garden dwellers. Tyler's paintings prove that she is equally adept at depicting these likable human characters as she is the natural world.

This is a story of a grandmother telling her grandchildren stories about adventures three children like them have living in a snail house. Children will probably mostly find the idea of three people being tiny enough to live in a snail house more exciting than the actual stories, which are pretty boring. The pictures are cute, though. ( )