Sarah’s Story

Pic courtesy flipkart

Author- Bill Harley
Illustration- Eve Aldridge
Age- 4-8 yrs

Awards- Winner of the National Parenting center of Approval and Best Read Aloud from Storytelling World.

Sarah’s Story is a wonderfully amusing book, with Sarah, a young imaginative child spinning a colorful story, filled with unexpected happenings and unlikely characters.

Sarah’s teacher assigns the class homework- to come up with a story the very next day. Sarah wants to impress and does not want to go with her mother’s boring suggestion of Goldilocks and the Three bears.

Instead she narrates what happens to her on her way to school that morning. She attributes her delayed entry to class, to these adventures where she almost like a modern day Alice meets a talking queen ant who is pregnant and her retinue of ants, a bee that carries her and of course gives her honey, and other magical and interesting things that usually happen in a child’s imagination.

While the class teacher is incredulous about the reality of Sarah’s experiences, she admits it sure makes for a most interesting story.

The detailed illustrations by Eve Aldridge( her first(!!) picture book) are delightful and you will find yourself answering a lot of questions based on them as well. An added touch is the way the words squeeze themselves or drop down or tilt to bring alive the action in the font itself.

Back home, my daughter Anushka often quips “Just like Sarah? That is the rule?” In one scene Sarah asks the queen ant to sample the food before rejecting it and the queen ends up loving the new food. As a result, we have a useful tool to coax kids to try new eatables and even new experiences of the non gastronomic kind.