Little Rooster's Diamond Button

I baught this book for my daughter who will be four years old in August and she loves it.

A story, before we begin. All children's librarians working for the New York Public Library system go through an intensive training process. Part of that training involves storytelling. This means that you must have the ability to tell a story all by yourself without the aid of a book in your hands. You must memorize the tale entirely, give credit where credit is due to its creator, and not deviate by so much as a word. Hard to do? You don't know the half of it. When it came to be my time to memorize a tale I found myself flipping through author Margaret Read MacDonald's, Twenty Tellable Tales: Audience Participation Folktales for the Beginning Storyteller. And there, front and center, was a little story called "The Turkish Sultan and the Little Pet Rooster". Bingo! I memorized it, performed it, and to this day I can tell it to you (though you'll have to allow for a bit of creative license in the places where my memory has decayed). And so I went blithely on my way, little knowing that the story that had saved my hide was being converted, construed, reconstituted, and reconvened into an entirely new entity. In short, what was once the tale of a Turkish sultan is now, "Little Rooster's Diamond Button", with art by Will Terry. Thankfully I saw that another reviewer had the goods on this tale, and I was delighted to find that the essential core of the story remains intact, though some details here and there have undergone curious conversions. For you see, there once was a little pet rooster who lived with a sweet little old lady. One day the rooster pecked up a diamond button from the dirt and intended to present it to his mistress, only to be waylaid by a nasty king. When the king steals the rooster's button, the fine fowl is not afraid to voice his complaints. Peeved, the king attempts to do away with the rooster by drowning, burning alive, and stinging it to death, respectively. Unfortunately for the increasingly put out monarch, the rooster has a magic stomach that gets it out of every scrape. When the king decides that the ultimate punishment is to put the rooster in his baggy pants and sit on him, the bird releases the bees it had eaten not long ago and the king is stung right quick. The ruler then gives up and allows the rooster access to his treasure room, but the bird doesn't think twice about eating up all the treasure, hopping on home, and then regurgitating it for his mistress so that the two can live happily ever after. The end. I'll be the first to admit that this is a really weird story. Roosters with magic bellies are not your everyday fairy tale motifs. The prodigious appetite found in this rooster can only be matched by that of Mortimer, the fine-feathered friend found in Joan Aiken's, Arabel's Raven. Of course, the difference here is that the rooster is capable of a kind of family friendly projectile vomiting that manages to maintain the story's interest without ever really grossing out the readership.