THE KING'S FLOWER
By
There was once a king who had to have everything bigger and better than anything else. . . . It took two men just to carry [his toothbrush] . . . . His knife and fork had to be hung from the ceiling with pulleys."" And when the king gets a toothache from eating the world's biggest candy bar, ""he ordered the blacksmiths to make a gigantic pair of pincers to pull out the royal tooth."" But the story ends routinely when a beautiful but normal-sized tulip blossoms in the king's enormous flower pot. ""'Perhaps biggest is not best after all,' said the king, wondering after the work of nature."" But if none of this is as breathtaking as Anno's Alphabet, . . . Journey, and . . . Counting Book, it does play with size discrepancies in a way that will tickle the same young children who'll relate to the obvious moral.