THE GUM CHEWING RATTLER

An anecdote from the youth of a veteran Arizona storyteller makes its first separate appearance in print, matched to a Mexican artist’s warmly humorous, photographically exact scenes. Hayes himself appears at beginning and end, recalling to a small group of listeners how, as a lad, he changed his mother’s irritated tune about keeping bubblegum in his shirt pockets. It seems that one day he stepped on a rattler’s tail, and when the snake whipped up to bite him, its fangs sank instead into a cache of gum. So big is the resulting bubble, that when it pops, the snake goes flying back and hits his head on a rock, knocking him out. Castro exaggerates the expressions on his human characters and gives the rattler a fiercely intense air of menace for this brief and thoroughly believable (right?) tale. (illustrator’s note) (Picture book. 6-8)