Fish Tale: The Story of Fish and Snail by Deborah Freedman

EVERY DAY .... SNAIL SITS IN ONE SPOT AND WAITS FOR FISH TO COME HOME WITH A STORY.

Stay-at-home snail has a good thing going! Fish loves to swim off and find adventure. Best of all, each day Fish ventures forth and finds a new book, reads it, and swims home to retell it to snail.

But today is different. Fish can't just tell this story: for this one you have to BE THERE!

"AAARRRGH!  SNAIL!!

THE NEW BOOK HAS A WHOLE OCEAN, A SECRET TREASURE, AND A PIRATE!"

When snail is too timid to follow Fish out of his old story and into the new one, Fish gets impatient.

"FINE."

But Snail can't bear for this to be The End of The Story of Fish and Snail. He creeps to the very edge of the page and peers across to the next book. Can he make the leap to follow Fish into a new story, one with treasure and pirates? Will Snail take the plunge?

In Deborah Freedman's new little modern fable of friendship, The Story of Fish and Snail (Viking, 2013), being a friend requires a leap of faith that brings a new beginning to Snail's story, one in which he is brave enough to be a bold buccaneer along with friend Fish. Freedman's story has a little meta-fiction fun, playing with the concept of book and page in the same way that Mo Willems did so humorously in his recent Elephant and Piggie tale, We Are in a Book! (An Elephant and Piggie Book), with the added theme that friendship and books have a way of stretching the boundaries for each of the pals in unforeseen ways. The New York Times Book Review says "It's meta for beginners, and even if the surreality may float over young heads, they'll relate to the story of friends with differences," while Kirkus raves, "Texture, scale and angle accentuate the exciting difference between the in-book worlds and the pale library background. This marvelous metabook shines in both concept and beauty."