SEEING IS BELIEVING

Shub's leprechaun pulls the oldest trick in the books--tying red garters around every ragweed plant in the field to foil the young treasure-seeker who has marked the burial spot with his red garter and gone off for a shovel. But the treatment the tale receives here makes it well worth digging up once more. Isadora gives us a leprechaun so full-bodied and real you feel you could hold him in your hand, like Tom does; yet the devilish faces she works into a vaporous magic brew escaping from the leprechaun's jug make for as other-worldly an aspect as one could ask. Her vistas recede, her leprechaun tumbles, her people gaze pensively or group convivially--all in fine black line that can be dramatic or subtly eloquent, and on eye-filling pages whose variety and balance is a treat in itself. In a second story, piskies are encountered later in life by the same man who was tricked by the leprechaun earlier. Here again, in one of those almost plotless folk minitales in which the seeing and believing comprise the whole point, Shub's down-to-earth telling and Isadora's drawings--both sturdy and delicate, tangible and mysterious--will win willing believers from here to Missouri.