LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

Ziefert and Bolam have collaborated on more felicitous projects than this clanky reworking of a familiar tale. This Easy-to-Read retelling is supposed to give fledgling readers a boost of confidence, with modest, repetitious vocabulary and short sentences, but the wording is clunky: “I will be careful,” says Little Red Riding Hood. “I will not talk to strangers.” The story can’t survive such an artless distillation, in which the eating of Grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood is disconcertingly antiseptic. The potential pleasure of reading is sacrificed to pure mechanics, making basal readers look like poetry. (Picture book. 4-7)