Turtle's Race with Beaver: A Traditional Seneca Story Book

Father-and-son team Joseph and James Bruchac - who also collaborated on Raccoon's Last Race: A Traditional Abenaki Story and How Chipmunk Got His Stripes - present a widespread Native American folktale in Turtle's Race With Beaver, one which (according to the brief foreword) probably originated with the Iroquois. The story of a race between a smaller, slower animal (Turtle), and a larger, swifter one (Beaver), it also bears a striking resemblance to the classic Aesopic fable of The Tortoise and the Hare , with a similar victory for the underdog.

An enjoyable story, joined to the colorful, cartoon-like artwork of José Aruego and Ariane Dewey - who also illustrated the two other Bruchac-and-Bruchac picture-books - makes for an excellent story-time selection for young folklore lovers. I was sorry to see Bruchac claiming definitively, in his foreword, that Aesop was of African descent, as that is by no means the most widely accepted theory (earliest sources place his birth in Thrace, and, of course, what we know as "Aesop's Fables" were actually first written down by Greco-Roman authors such as Babrius and Phaedrus, long after the time of Aesop, making their origin somewhat problematic), but leaving aside that glaring simplification, I recommend Turtle's Race With Beaver. Just be prepared, if you intend to share the foreword with young readers, to explain how much more complicated the historical and literary record is, as regards Aesop, than indicated in Bruchac's brief remarks.