CROCUS 2010 starts today!

Saffron Tree is a growing repository of children's book reviews. For the last three plus years, I have shared wonderful children's books at Saffron Tree and come to learn about many more.

Please join us as we get ready to embark on a week-long virtual odyssey with our second annual festival, CROCUS: Celebrate Reading Of Culturally Unique Stories.

Love and Roast Chicken

Love and Roast Chicken
A Trickster Tale from the Andes Mountains
written and illustrated by Barbara Knutson (2004)

Suggested age: 5-8 years
Country/Region:Andean South America
Category: Folklore, Humor, Multicultural

Trickster's tales worldwide typically deal with the use of trickery to outwit strong opponents against whom mere physical combat would lead to certain defeat. Author Barbara Knutson's notes that a trickster's tale usually is about a small animal (or a person), who uses brains instead of force to compete against bigger fiercer character.

Love and Roast Chicken is a trickster's tale from the Andes mountain, where the traditional trickster is the small gray fox. However, this is a special story about a quick-thinking guinea pig, Cuy, as the trickster who manages to escape the clutches of Tío Antonio, the wily fox, through a series of clever capers that is bound to elicit a chuckle or two from the young readers.

Head on over to CROCUS 2009 at Saffron Tree to read more...

Abuela's Weave

Abuela's Weave
written by Omar S. Castaneda
illustrated by Enrique O. Sanchez

Suggested ages: 4-8 years
Country/Region: Guatemala
Publisher: Lee & Low Books Inc., NY

Picture a fairly idyllic setting with a thatched hut, some pheasants and chickens pecking about by the thatch, some large trees, rolling lush mounds, some farmers hard at work in the background, a butterfly or two flitting about, while a grandmother gently yet firmly urges her granddaughter to "Pull back hard... Make it jolt, so the thread stays close, like family."

She is kneeling in front of a backstrap loom willingly passing on her weaving acumen to her granddaughter, Esperanza.

Grandma (Abuela, in Spanish) is nervous about selling her hand-made, one-of-a-kind huipiles (blouses), tablecoths, skirts and tapestries at the Fiesta de Pueblos in Guate, especially when mass-produced machine-made goods were attracting the shoppers with their low price.

Head on over to CROCUS 2009 at Saffron Tree to read the rest of this review...

CROCUS 2009 is here!