NURSERY TALES AROUND THE WORLD

Eighteen traditional stories, specifically selected, according to the introduction, for reading to children who are beyond nursery rhymes but are not yet ready for Winnie-the-Pooh. Sierra (The Elephant's Wrestling Match, 1992, etc.) gives the whole enterprise an academic air, opening with a disquisition on the nature and educational benefits of folktales and closing with needlessly detailed source notes (``Catalogued by Aarne and Thompson as Tale Type 275A . . .''). The tales themselves, though, have been chosen with the heart and ear of a storyteller: a healthy mix of chestnuts (Joseph Jacobs's ``Three Little Pigs''), less common stories (``The Pancake,'' from Norway), and delightful variants on familiar tales, such as a Philippine version of ``The Bremen Town Musicians'' that features a crab, an eel, a bedbug, a mosquito, and a small bird. The stories are arranged into thematic triplets—``Fooling the Big Bad Wolf,'' ``Runaway Cookies''—accompanied by Vitale's stately, naive illustrations and his wide folkloric borders around each page, all done with thinly applied oils on rough panels of wood. A sumptuous, if cerebral, alternative to Kay Chorao's Child's Storybook (1985) or Anne Rockwell's popular collections. (bibliography) (Folklore. 4+)