Big Quiet House
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
This story opens with "There once was a man whose house was very small," and it continues, "It was cluttered with things from wall to wall." With a tiny, cluttered house, giggling children, and a snoring wife, the poor man can't get a good night's sleep. If only, he thinks, I had a big quiet house! He throws off his covers and goes to visit the wise old woman at the edge of the village. Surely she can help him solve his problem. And she does, but not without giving him some very unusual advice. “Bring a chicken into your house,” she suggests. And when that doesn't work, she has him add a goat, a horse, a cow, and even a sheep. The ending of the story proves, as so many ancient folktales do, that quite often, nonsense makes the best sense of all. Susan Greenstein's bold illustrations—white pencil on black surface with watercolor - carry the reader through the warm interiors and peaceful nights of the shtetls of Eastern Europe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Forest revisits the popular Yiddish folktale that also inspired Margot Zemach's classic It Could Always Be Worse (1976). A poor man who longs for a "big quiet house" where his wife's snoring and his children's giggling will not annoy him consults the wisest woman in the shtetl (most versions cast a rabbi as the advice-giver). On successive visits, she instructs him to bring first a chicken, then a goat, horse, cow, and a sheep inside his house, which of course adds to the din. Finally, when she tells him to remove the noisy animals, the man has a new appreciation for his relatively large and quiet house. Forest hams up her telling with intermittent rhymes and refrains, inviting audience participation with a number of animal noises, but she lacks Zemach's canny wit and expert pacing. Greenstein enhances the story's historical flavor by using watercolor and streaky white pencil on a black surface, resulting in a pleasingly old-fashioned, woodcut-like appearance. Ages 4-7.
