THE THREE LITTLE PIGS

Three little pigs to savor, and a wolf to lord it over: from the clover-sprigged jacket (three-leaf of course) to the third little pig covering the steaming pot from which the wolf's tail protrudes, this is a blithe, unbloody business with a leer on the face of the wolf that you can only laugh at. The text is Jacobs tightened, the drawings are jaunty rustic (with houses inventively framed in straw, sticks, bricks), the whole is more adroit and much more tasteful than Palazzo, more childlikely than the verse version of du Bois. No one will want to abandon Leslie Brooke but like Galdone's Henny Penny, this animates the tale for the widest possible audience.