The Animal Hedge - Hardcover

Paul Fleischman is the award-winning author of many books for children and young adults, including JOYFUL NOISE: POEMS FOR TWO VOICES, winner of the Newbery Medal; DATELINE: TROY, an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults; and WESLANDIA, a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year and an American Library Association Notable Children’s Book. He lives in the town of Aromas, California. "Growing up in Santa Monica, California," he recalls, "I used to walk past a hedge trimmed into animal shapes. I felt sure there was a story in that hedge - all I had to do was look for it, then trim it into shape."

Bagram Ibatoulline was born in Russia, graduated from the State Academic Institute of Arts in Moscow, and has worked in the fields of fine arts, graphic arts, mural design, and textile design. He has illustrated CROSSING by Philip Booth, an American Library Association Notable Children’s Book, and THE NIGHTINGALE by Hans Christian Andersen as retold by Stephen Mitchell. He says, "As I was working on THE ANIMAL HEDGE, I was most influenced by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American folk art. I appreciate the naiveté of those untrained painters."

Kindergarten-Grade 3-There are no surprises in this gentle story, but there is ample assurance that following the dictates of one's heart is the surest path to personal fulfillment. In classic folkloric tradition, Fleischman tells of a happy farmer and his three sons who sing merrily as they go about their chores. When they fall on hard times, they are forced to sell their livestock and move to a small cottage surrounded by a hedge. While trimming it, the farmer begins to see shapes of animals within it and adjusts his clipping so that they become visible to all. As the boys become old enough to set out into the world, he cuts the hedge down. Each young man watches it grow and trims it, finding the shape of his own dreams: a carriage and team of horses, a sailing vessel, a fiddler playing for dancers. Thus, each is pointed toward his true vocation. In a conclusion that seems as inevitable as it is satisfying, the sons pitch in to buy their father the livestock he needs to return to the animal husbandry that is his soul's delight. Ibatoulline's watercolor-and-gouache illustrations, inspired by 19th-century American folk-art paintings, are the perfect complement to this simple allegory. Simply lovely.
Miriam Lang Budin, Chappaqua Public Library, NY
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