Product Description

A baby chicken accepts a young boy as her mother and later becomes a surrogate mother for some ducklings that she has hatched.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1628044 in Books
• Published on: 1997-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 32 pages

From School Library Journal
Kindergarten-Grade 3-A delightful story about a chick who is raised by a boy. He "...was not the kind of mother the chick had expected, but she loved him anyway." When she is fully grown, she hatches a clutch of abandoned eggs and unknowingly mothers five ducklings. She is shocked when her children insist on going for a swim, but when they come back to her and she inspects them more closely, she realizes that "Ducklings were not the kind of family she had expected, but she loved them anyway." This tender tale will please families everywhere. The subtle messages of love, expectation, and parental roles will appeal to adoptive and extended families as well. The nurturing boy is a refreshing, albeit minor, character. The clean, simple, cartoonlike watercolors are placed in appealing juxtaposition to the text. Some illustrations are boxed into squares and rectangles, while on other pages the drawings are freely strewn across a clean white background. This warm, caring book should find a place on the shelf next to P.D. Eastman's Are You My Mother? (Random, 1986) and Keiko Kasza's A Mother for Choco (Putnam, 1992). A pleasant story-hour offering.
Beth Tegart, Oneida City Schools, NY
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Ages 4-7. When the baby chick looks out of the egg, she sees a boy. He was "not the kind of mother the chick had expected, but she loved him anyway." So it goes, with the chick becoming a hen and being given duck eggs by the boy to raise. She raises the ducklings, as she would chickens. and they love her anyway. And when the ducklings take to the water, despite her "DANGER dance," she loves them anyway. This graceful fable, in which love is greater than any set of labels, is well served by the watercolor and pen-and-ink illustrations. The ducklings, peering attentively out of their eggs, and the little hen herself are quite individually rendered, and the drawing of the danger dance will inspire young performers. Varying page designs and effective use of white space amplify the visual pleasure. Mary Harris Veeder

From Kirkus Reviews
A charmingly sagacious three-generation fable. When the chick hatches, her first sight is a boy who, in everything that matters, becomes her parent: He shows her ``how to find water and food and grit,'' teaches her to watch out for hawks and vacuum cleaners, and cuddles her ``under the edge of his quilt'' at night. Still, once grown, she builds a nest, so the boy finds her an orphaned clutch of eggs--duck eggs. History repeats itself, with a difference; the hen passes on the boy's lessons but must learn to accept her brood's fondness for water. The author's illustrations are wonderfully expressive. Adults will find the contrasts with ``The Ugly Duckling'' and the wholesome contemporary message diverting (Reiser is also a psychiatrist), but the subtexts never burden a story that is also sure to appeal to its intended audience. (Picture book. 3-8) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Absolutely Charming
We found this book a delightful surprise. The story is quite sweet and the repetition comforting. My 2+1/2 year old has made this one of his favorites. The protectiveness of both the boy as mama and then the hen as mama is wonderfully reinforcing. We love to enact the mama hen's danger squalk and danger dance.

The rhyming and pacing of the story make it fun for a read aloud, especially when you have to do it over and over again. I also find the balance of artwork and white space and the size of the text on the page to make it even that more appealing. Our son even loves to study the cover of the book which represents the whole story line in picture vignettes if you follow the squares arround the border.

I would also highly recommend this book as a novel way to introduce the concept of family diversity and/or adoption too.

Decodability Ranking Level 4
Use Lynn Reiser's care-giving characters to DECODEnglish!

Engaging stories like this one are fun for your child to read when explicit pronunciation, spelling, and decoding skills have progessed to Level 4. Other Amazon titles with similar linguistic complexity include:

The Zax (from "The Sneetches and Other Stories) by Dr. Seuss

The Bagpipe Who Didn't Say No (from "Where the Sidewalk Ends") by Shel Silverstein

"The Big Red Barn" by Margaret W. Brown

"Pie Rats Ahoy!" by Richard Scarry

"Swimmy" by Leo Lionni

"First Tomato" by Rosemary Wells