Babushka's Mother Goose Book

Drawing from traditional Ukrainian and Moldavian folklore, from the Mother Goose rhymes and from Aesop, and from her own inexhaustible store of original poems and songs, Patricia Polacco presents a picture-book anthology of short read-aloud selections in Babushka's Mother Goose, created as a tribute to her own Babushka, and to grandmothers everywhere. From the opening poem, Day, in which the sun calls upon young Sasha to wake up, to the concluding Day Ending, in which Babushka tucks her grandchildren into bed, the twenty-four pieces here reflect the Eastern European flavor of the storytelling she was exposed to as a young girl, sitting on the lap of her Babushka Gaw.

Although I can't say that this is one of my favorite Patricia Polacco titles - the original poems just didn't do much for me, and the traditional selections were too infrequent to compensate for it - I think that fans of the author/artist will still find material that they can enjoy. The artwork is vintage Polacco, very colorful (even more colorful than her usual fare), with a sense of motion and fun. Some scenes - particularly when accompanying some of the more traditional tales, like Fox and Crane (from Aesop) or The Clay Pot (an interesting variant on The Mitten ) - reminded me of the work of Y. Rachov, in The Wheat Stalk: Ukrainian Folk Tales . I also greatly appreciated the author's brief note, at the beginning of the book, indicating which selections were original, and which were taken or adapted from other sources.