Rating: *** 3 stars

Henriette Barkow, illustrated by. Lizzie Finlay,
Buri and the Marrow.
Mantra, 2000

As part of the ‘World Tales Series’, this folk take from South Asia is about an old woman travelling through a forest to visit her daughter and en route, meeting a fox, a tiger and a lion. One by one, she persuades them not to eat her until her return journey (when she will be ‘nice and fat’). Her daughter helps her think of a plan to outwit them but the fox has to be scared off in a different way. Although the text looks crowded at times, with little space around it (the Bengali text looks larger than the English and therefore appears even more cramped on a couple of pages) the text and illustrations are well-matched and the book would lend itself to bilingual story telling. Available in 14 other dual language editions.

Urmi Chana