It's a Fairy Tale! It's an Alphabet Book! It's an Art Book! It's a Cookbook!

UndergroundLibrarian@evpl — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 01:30:00 GMT

It's Carmine: A Little More Red by Melissa Sweet! This LIttle Red Riding Hood version has a main character named Carmine. The first page shows the word ALPHABET (Granny taught Carmine to read by putting together the letters in her alphabet soup.) The second page shows the word BEWARE (Granny phoned to invite Carmine for alphabet soup, and told her to look out for the wolf that Granny heard howling last night.) The next page features the word CLUTTER (Carmine rummaged through her clutter to gather her art materials for the trip.)

With a name like Carmine, as you can imagine, Carmine felt that any of her paintings could be improved by adding a little more red. In fact, that's what causes her to stray FARTHER (the word on the f page) off the path --and we all know what happens then! Except in this story it's not Carmine who talks to the wolf, but her quivering, quaking dog Rufus. And thus the s page, SURREAL ("Rufus began to bark, and the wolf knew exactly what he was saying. SURREAL as it may seem, dogs are descendants of wolves, and it made sense that the wolf could understand his language.")

I especially like the page for the letter u ("USUALLY the neighbors are home and would have heard Granny's cry for help. And USUALLY a woodcutter is around, but on this day he was deep in the woods, felling trees for a treehouse.")

So there you have it: the fairy tale, the alphabet, and the art. But what about the cookbook? On the back end page is the recipe for Granny's Alphabet Soup! As Carmen says on the v page, VOILA!

Kids Blog : LIttle Red Riding Hood

It's a Fairy Tale! It's an Alphabet Book! It's an Art Book! It's a Cookbook!