Snail Tale: The Adventures of a Rather Small Snail [Import] [Hardcover]

Avi (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 48 pages
• Publisher: Hutchinson (June 4, 1973)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 009115720X
• ISBN-13: 978-0091157203
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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3.0 out of 5 stars A Seeming Knock-Off of Frog and Toad, July 29, 2009

By 

Dwight Blubaugh "MichiBlue" (The only Eaton Rapids on Earth, MI, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Snail Tale: The Adventures of a Rather Small Snail (Beaver Books) (Paperback)

Avi is one of my all-time favorite children's / YA authors, and has consistently written excellent children's literature throughout his long and varied writing career. Out of about 50 Avi books I had read before this one, I only remember one title ("Who is That Masked Man Anyway?") that I didn't connect with - coincidentally, one of Avi's personal favorites. This book makes two.

SNAIL TALE / THE ADVENTURES OF A RATHER SMALL SNAIL is Avi's second book, as well as his second picture book. The book seems like a knock-off of Arnold Lobel's "Frog and Toad" books, and 1972 would be the right era for this to be true. In SNAIL TALE, instead of the protagonists being a frog and toad, Avi's characters are a snail and an ant.

In the book, Avon the snail and Edward the ant decide to go on an adventure together. Edward repeatedly uses flawed reasoning to talk Avon into nonsensical decisions. When Edward tells Avon about the possibility of meeting up with a dragon, he warns him that you can always tell a dragon by the fact that dragons disguise themselves as other creatures. So when they meet a mouse, the fact that it's NOT a dragon is proof enough for Edward that it really IS a dragon disguised as something else - an argument he uses to convince his friend Avon, and even the mouse himself. And when they return to Avon's home at the end of their journey, Edward convinces Avon that it must be a magical castle disguised to look like Avon's house because they've come such a long way. Never mind that they've retraced their steps and returned where they started.

The book rambles on for 46 pages, sometimes cleverly, sometimes tediously. While being a bit like a "Frog and Toad" book, it does not succeed quite like those books do. I'm very pleased that Avi eventually hit his stride in writing and has produced such wonderful gems as he has, but this is not one of them.