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PRESCHOOL
Rueda, Claudia

Redlocks and the Three Bears

48 pp. | Chronicle | November, 2021 | Trade ISBN 978-1-4521-7031-2 $16.99
(2) PS The Three Bears are sitting down to porridge when Little Red from "the book next door" knocks asking for help because she thinks the Big Bad Wolf wants to eat her. Narrator Baby Bear convinces Mama and Papa to let Little Red stay ("Not sure if that's how the story goes, they said, but...Ok"), and then the Goldilocks tale begins to play out. When the Wolf arrives, the bears and Little Red run to "another book" (one about three pigs). But the Wolf is just sad because no one wants him in their book, and a little kindness and understanding--and three bowls of porridge--help set everything right. Well, almost, since the bears then don't answer the door when Goldilocks herself arrives. The story's humor relies on readers' familiarity with the original tales in order to relish the ways they overlap here. That Baby Bear breaks the fourth wall by turning a page to see the Wolf visually reinforces the metafictive text: these characters realize they're in stories, but they recognize that characters and stories can change. Rueda (Huff & Puff, rev. 5/12) also embraces the art of storytelling with ornamentation on otherwise all-text pages reminiscent of early illustrated books. Her textured colored-pencil pictures featuring friendly, rotund characters in spare but warm surroundings lend an air of coziness to this clever tale. A handwritten scrap of paper ­containing "Mama's ­Porridge secret recipe" appears on the back endpapers for any hungry little (wolf) readers out there.
Reviewer: Cynthia K. Ritter | Horn Book Magazine Issue: January, 2022

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