Legends, Fables and Folk Tales
Brown, Marcia, Stone
Soup, Aladdin, 1997. (Grades PreK-2)
Old French tale
about soldiers who trick miserly villages into making them a
feast. This version won a Caldecott Medal when Brown retold and
illustrated it in 1947. |
Gregory, Kristina, The
Legend of Jimmy Spoon, Odyssey, 1993. (Grades 4-7)
Twelve-year-old
Jimmy Spoon yearns for a life of adventure. So when two Shoshoni
boys offer him a horse, Jimmy sneaks away from his family in Salt
Lake City to follow the boys. When Jimmy arrives at the Shoshoni
camp, he discovers that he is expected to stay - as a member of
the tribe. Inspired by the memoirs of a white man who actually lived
with Chief Washakie's tribe as a boy in the mid-1800s, The Legend
of Jimmy Spoon is a compelling coming-of-age adventure.
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Hamilton, Virginia, The
People Could Fly: The Picture Book, Knopf/Random House, 2005. (Grades 3-5)
A group of African slaves
working in cotton fields in America escape an abusive overseer
through magic recalled from Africa. |
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Ketteman, Helen, and
James Warhola, Bubba, the Cowboy Prince: A Fractured Texas Tale,
Scholastic, 1997 (Grades K-3).
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Osborne, Mary Pope,
American Tall Tales, Knopf, 1991.
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San Souci, Robert, Cut From the Same Cloth; American Women
of Myth, Legend and Tall Tale, Philomel, 1993 (Grades 3-8).
The women come from the Native American, African
American, Mexican American, and Canadian traditions. Although
they differ in many ways from their male counterparts, there
are still tricksters, sweet talkers, and brave and strong protagonists
like those found in hero stories. There has been some retelling,
some modifications of dialects, some reshaping of open endings,
but the plots have not been tampered with. Each story is illustrated
with an engraving of some sort, with black background and white
lines that give the pictures an antique quality like a woodcut
or copper engraving. Notes on the stories and an extensive
list of further reading are appended.
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Walker, Paul Robert,
Big Men, Big Country: A Collection of American Tall Tales, Harcourt,
Brace, Jovanovich, 1993 (Grades 4-7).
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