From School Library Journal
Kindergarten-Grade 3—Tiddler is a tiny fish with a propensity for tall tales. Habitually late for school, he offers a different excuse each day. He's been riding a seahorse, got trapped in a treasure chest, was captured by a squid, etc. The other students discount his stories, but Little Johnny Dory loves them and passes them on to his grandmother, who tells a crab, who tells a plaice, and so on. When Tiddler's daydreaming lands him far from home, it is the retracing of the trail of his own stories that leads him back again. The rhyme scheme here isn't precise, but it is reader-friendly, and invites participation: "'Sorry I'm late, Miss. I set off really early,/but on the way to school I was captured by a squid./I wriggled and I struggled till a turtle came and rescued me.'/'Oh no he didn't.' 'OH YES HE DID.'" The title here is a bit misleading as Tiddler doesn't tell his tales to mislead anyone deliberately, as in the original fable. Instead, he resembles Dr. Seuss's Marco from
And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (Random, 1989), whose imagination is similarly bursting at the seams. The colorful, detailed illustrations feature an endearing cast of undersea denizens with the text woven through on clean white space. This would be an engaging book to share when stories have an underwater theme or when discussing how tales proliferate.—
Grace Oliff, Ann Blanche Smith School, Hillsdale, NJ Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Title aside, this picture book is not an homage to Aesop so much as it is a salute to stories and how they travel. Tiddler, a little fish with “plain gray scales,” is given to flights of narrative fancy, and while most of his schoolmates do not believe Tiddler’s outrageous excuses for his tardiness, his friend Little Johnny Dory likes the tales so much that he tells them to his grandmother, who tells others. A misadventure with a fisherman’s net leaves Tiddler “lost in the middle of the ocean,” but the frightened fish hears a shoal of anchovies telling his story. The anchovies lead Tiddler to the shrimp who told them the story, the shrimp leads Tiddler to the whale who told her, and so on, until Tiddler follows his own story all the way home. The story has clear parallels to the film Finding Nemo but Donaldson avoids Disney cutesiness in her rhythmic text, and Scheffler creates winsome, expressive cartoon fish in appealing, bright coral-reef colors. Preschool-Kindergarten. --Janice Del Negro
