Summary:
The Turtle's Shell tells the story of Tobi, a smart turtle who thinks he can get away with deceiving his friends. He ends up learning a few shell cracking lessons. This friendly easy-to-read book shows children how our everyday actions and decisions always consequences. This story also draws attention to the nuggets of wisdom embedded in African cultural stories which can be emulated by any child whatever their racial background.
My Review:
Throughout history children and adults alike have been telling and listening to tales that explain the unexplainable and to teach lessons. This is where author Vincent Eke seems to excel.
His first book features the wise woman, only known as Mama, who tells tales to children to teach them important lessons. This rather tall tale works to explain how the turtle came to have such a bumpy and patchy looking shell. More importanly though, the lesson teaches children to stay true to your word, share, and not be greedy. A lesson we all should learn.
I have heard my share of tall tales and I loved Vincent Eke's. As with all of the original story tellers legends and tales, they were not written but told orally. I do think he has heard this one before and possibly many others as he has more tales from "Mama" forthcoming.
As this book seems to be for older children, (I reccomend 5-10 years old) there are few pictures in the book. What ones there are have been done in strict black and white line drawings as you would find in a coloring book. The rest of the pages are all sandy color brown. All of this makes for confusinon. I have to wonder if the author intended the book to be a coloring book and later added the tale? I found this one thing to be the only negative about the book. For me it simply added nothing to the overall book.
Overall, I felt this to be a pretty good book and hope to see more tales from this author. 4 stars.
~Naila Moon
Disclosure: I received a copy of this book for my open and honest opinion. The views expressed here are 100% my own and may differ with yours.
Where to find the author:
Amazon
Goodreads
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