Go to Sleep, Gecko!

We've been reading a lot of folktales lately.

This one's not my *favorite*, but it's pretty good. Gecko can't sleep because the fireflies blink on and off all night, and the blinking keeps him awake. So he asks Elephant, the village boss, to make the fireflies stop blinking. Well, the fireflies tell Elephant that they're blinking because Water Buffalo poops all over the road, and they blink their lights so no one will accidentally step in the poop in the dark.

Yep. Poop. And that's one thing that I really like about this story: it uses the word "poop" without any self-consciousness or joking around. It just is what it is. And that, for some reason, makes me laugh.

Anyway, Water Buffalo has a pretty good reason for pooping in the road (let's see how many more times I can type "poop" in one blog post!), and that reason leads to another reason, and so on. The moral of the story is that everything is connected, which is a good one, but I'm not sure a lot of kids will understand it very well.

Poop.

Go to Sleep, Gecko!

Written by Margaret Read MacDonald
Age range*: 4-6
My rating: 3 stars [out of five]

*Age ranges are very flexible.

Full disclosure: I don't receive any compensation for reviewing children's books--the books are usually just checked out from the local library.