Dedicated by the aboriginal author to ``all the naughty children in the world,'' 20 lively original stories replete with the mythic stuff of wonder tales--magic, transformation, resurrection, eating alive, disgorging, and other comically earthy workings of the digestive tract--all recounted in an engaging colloquial style. Animals and humans demonstrate such classic foibles as greed, vanity, cruelty, or laziness, balanced by forgiveness, courage, kindness, or love. There are creation tales, fables, pourquoi and trickster tales; talking animals, giants, monsters, and spirits. Resonances are many--with African and Native American myths, Aesop, E. Nesbit's plans-gone-awry, Roald Dahl's irreverence. In the splendidly decorative art-- powerful in design and satirically funny in detail--humans are brown-skinned, but the stylized animals come in a vibrant spectrum of imaginative hues. The author explains that some of the stories were created, and told, in her own family; her enthusiasm for them shines from every page. Follow this with Ted Hughes's equally humorous, more philosophical Tales of the Early World (1991). Glossary. (Folklore. 5-12)
