Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens

Harcourt Brace & Company, San Diego, 1995.
Hardcover edition, 40 pages, ISBN 0-15-292851-0.

Stevens has created a freshly minted trickster tale a la Uncle Remus contrasting a hilariously lazy bear and an extremely enterprising hare. Hare has a large family to feed, but no land to grow a garden. Bear has all sorts of land, but no inclination to work. They enter into a sloppily defined pact crafted cleverly Hare, whereby Bear will receive the top half of all produce, and Hare will take the bottom half. Hare tricks Bear by planting all root vegetables such as radishes, carrots, and beets. When the sleepy Bear realizes he has been duped, he reverses the deal, but the cunning Hare plants lettuce, broccoli and celery. The angry Bear alters the contract so that he gets tops and bottoms while Hare gets only the middles. Hare slyly plants corn.

Bear learns from these episodes to become more attentive and industrious, while Hare profits by selling the vegetables to buy property to feed his family and perpetuate his business.

The story is best for the more mature end of the preschool spectrum, due to both the length and complexity of the text. The format of the book, which appropriately opens top to bottom, is perfect for group reading.

ABC Children's Booksellers' Choice
ALA Notable Children's Book
Bill Martin, Jr. Picture Book Award
Booklist Editors' Choice
Caldecott Honor Book
Colorado Children's Book Award
Instructor Magazine's Best Picture Book of the Twentieth Century
IRA Teachers' Choice
IRA-CBC Children's Choice
Maryland Children's Book Award
National Parenting Publications Gold Award
Parents' Choice Silver Honor Book
Show Me Readers Award
SSLI Honor Book
Storytelling World Award Honor Book

Pig-Boy: A Trickster Tale from Hawai'i by Gerald McDermott

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2009.
Hardcover edition, 32 pages, ISBN 978-0152165901.
In the source notes for this tale, McDermott details the history of the mythological character from which the Pig-Boy is drawn, the oral tradition from which it sprang, and the first transcriptions and publications in the Hawaiian language in the mid to late nineteenth century. He also acknowledges the expertise of scholars who advised him in researching and re-telling the story.

I am familiar with McDermott’s previous trickster characters, Zomo the Rabbit, Coyote, and Raven, but had not yet encountered this charming, insatiable swine. Pig-Boy’s adventures unfold in the rhythms of transcribed speech, following him through hunger-driven theft of the king’s chickens, a frightening encounter with the goddess Pele near her volcano, and capture by the king’s men, all of which he manages to thwart with clever shape-changes.

Pig-Boy is portrayed in purple, which immediately sets him apart from “real” pigs, and prepares the reader for some magical doings to come. The illustrations exhibit simply-detailed foregrounds colorfully drawn against soothing green backgrounds. He is not depicted as a wise-cracking, fiendishly clever, wily villain or clown as are other trickster characters such as Anansi or Coyote. This endearing piglet begins and ends the story sweetly enfolded in his beautiful, loving, Hawaiian grandmother’s arms, making it a good introductory trickster tale for 2-3 year-olds who may as yet be unable to decipher complexities of humor or trickery.