The Old Woman and the Hen.

Gregory Bryan is a member of the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.

Although P.K. Page’s The Old Woman and the Hen is a generally enjoyable, sweet story, it is not likely to appeal to a very wide audience of children. Jim Westergard’s woodcuts are skilfully done, but the absence of colour and the small size and number of the illustrations will not be attractive to some children. What results is a book that many children will find to be rather inaccessible. At over $10, the publication also seems overpriced for a soft cover, sparsely illustrated, short book. The text and illustrations appear only on one side of a page (every second page is blank), yet every page is included in the page number sequence.

In The Old Woman and the Hen, an elderly woman rescues a bedraggled hen. She then discovers that the hen lays magical crystal eggs. When she gazes into the eggs, the woman can see the future. It is a magical story and is told in a lyrical, pleasant style, but the book simply does not have enough to offer children for it to be considered as a first choice purchase.