Aesop's Fables

November 1, 2013
Grades 2-5 First published in 1963, this collection contains 61 of Aesop's Fables, including both well-known titles like The Tortoise and the Hare and The Boy Who Cried Wolf and the less familiar The Wizard and Jupiter, Neptune, Minerva, and Momus. All are told in two pages or less, most with stylized black-and-white illustrations, and each story contains a moral appearing in boldface print at the end. In addition to the table of contents, there is an alphabetical index that will be helpful for teachers or readers looking for a specific fable. The interior design of this slim volume has an old-fashioned feel, and it is possible that the gray background panels on which the stories appear may make it difficult for use by students with visual impairments. Even so, these fables would be well utilized in a classroom setting in support of the Common Core standards and may lead students to seek out further Aesop retellings.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2014
This staple of classrooms and book fairs since it was originally published, McGovern's collection of sixty-one fables is reissued with a new cover by Ricardo Tercio. McGovern's retellings are solid and the small size will attract independent readers, but the exaggerated cartoonish figures in the illustrations date the volume.

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