Childrens Book Review of Jack: A Beanstalk Story Retold and Illustrated by Tomie dePaola

The characters in the Jack Tales generally are bumbling but endearing. They typically avoid being outright unlikeable. They nevertheless can be temperamental and unpredictable. For example, Jack Frost chooses to:

• Avalanche and freeze detractors; or
• Regale fans and friends with brown, orange, red, and yellow foliage and fern-iced windows.

The exceptional forays into petty misconduct usually confer an overall realism upon Jack. Jack’s personality indeed exhibits both anti-heroic and heroic qualities. For example, Beanstalk Jack exchanges his impoverished widowed mother’s milk-cow for beans, not money. But the beans give Jack access to a giant’s treasure trove of:

• Gold coins;
• Golden eggs;
• Self-playing harp.

Jack and his mother live the rest of their lives in happy, healthy comfort.

Jack appears to:

• Know his candles and quills;
• Respect his elders.

He does not leave his grandfather’s house without receiving permission to:

• Enjoy lasting friendships;
• Establish independent lodgings;
• Experience city life.

Grandpa encourages Jack to seek the king’s advice regarding permanent quarters. Jack therefore heads to the city as planned. Along the way, he makes quick but lifelong friendships with:

• Cat, chicken, cow, crow;
• Dog, duck;
• Frog;
• Goose;
• Horse;
• Owl;
• Pig;
• Sheep.

He consequently obtains an audience with the king as one of a veritable phalanx of baaing, barking, grunting, hooting, meowing, mooing, neighing, quacking, riveting house-hunters. The king evidently rules compassionately and wisely since the correct fit is made between Jack’s crowd and a huge fixer-upper.

The updated telling of a well-behaved Beanstalk Jack-like character’s adventures blends beautifully with Thomas Anthony dePaola’s upbeat illustrations. The 2014-released publication generally gets librarian- and teacher-determined literacy levels of:

• Ages 3 – 5 years;
• Grades preschool through kindergarten.

It indeed lends itself wonderfully to formal and informal, individual and group activities relating to:

• Animal art;
• Faunal sounds;
• Nursery rhymes (with cameo appearances of Jack and Jill climbing uphill and Little Red Riding Hood entering the forest).

It therefore makes for solid familial and pedagogical fun what with:

• The fixer-upper;
• The repetition of each friend’s home-seeking commitment round-robining like This is the House That Jack Built’s cat, cheese, cow, dog, farmer, horse, hound, judge, maiden, man, rat, and rooster

My special thanks to:

• Talented photographers and concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the Internet;

• Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University for superior on-campus and on-line resources.

Cruikshank, George. 1911. The Cruikshank Fairy-Book: Four Famous Stories. New York and London: G.P. Putnam's Sons, the Knickerbocker Press.

• Available via Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/cruikshankfairyb00cruirich 

dePaola, Tomie. 2014. Jack. New York, NY: Nancy Paulsen Books.

dePaola, Tomie. 22 October 2013. “Jack and the Castor Bean Plant.” Tomie’s Blog.blogspot.com. Whitebird, Inc. Retrieved December 22, 2013.

• Available at: http://tomiesblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/jack-and-castor-bean-plant.html