Customer Reviews

The Fisherman and His Wife

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What a super interpretation of a classic story. I read this to my son and I really chuckled at Ms. Isadora's humor. My son thought it a great, wacky story and asked how a writer from so long ago wrote such a "real" story. We really got into the pictures and my son wanted to try his hand at collage art work. We cut pictures from magazines and different papers and he made his own beach scene. The book was very creative and blew us away. We will take out some of Ms. Isadore's other books.

Using an African-themed setting that includes striking fabric designs, Rachel Isadora retells the classic Brothers Grimm tale about a hapless fisherman and his greedy wife. When the fisherman is surprised to catch a talking flounder, he consents to its request for release back to the sea. The wife, upset that her husband came home with no fish to cook for dinner, insisted that he go back and ask the magical fish to grant them a wish.

What started out as a reasonable wish to replace their dilapidated and stinky shack with a new hut that they genuinely needed, turned into a subsequent set of wishes for increasingly grandiose positions of wealth and power. The more unreasonable the wishes became, that's the darker and angrier the stormy sea grew, until the wife's final extravagant and impossible wish led them back to their original situation in the dilapidated shack. This book serves as a nice vehicle for teaching about the difference between wants and needs and the potential pitfalls of allowing the pursuit of wants to escalate.