THE MCELDERRY BOOK OF AESOP’S FABLES

Morpurgo offers 21 old fables, plus a trenchant new one of his own by way of introduction, all written in an informal tone—“ ‘There you are, said Mouse.’ ‘I told you I’d pay you back, didn’t I?’ ‘A tiddly thing like you helping out a king of the beasts like me,’ Lion replied. ‘Who’d have thought it possible?’ ”—and capped by traditional morals in capital letters. That tone, along with Chichester Clark’s lightly humorous cartoons of wide-eyed, smiling or only faintly distressed-looking animals and people in, usually, rural settings, put this collection somewhere between Brad Sneed’s broadly colloquial Aesop’s Fables (2003) and Doris Orgel’s weighty renditions of The Lion and the Mouse, and Other Aesop Fables (2000), majestically illustrated by Bert Kitchen. Try it one on one, or with small groups of listeners. (Folk tales. 6-8)