Beauty and the Serpent: Thirteen Tales of Unnatural Animals

This is a finely crafted interweaving of interesting stories about unnatural animals - some super, and a few infra natural - into a narrative about student, teacher and librarian interactions over the course of a school year. The narrative is structured as a ring composition, beginning with an outrageous teenager meeting an adult, the librarian, who is her equal in outrageousness, and ending with a cautionary tale told by the librarian, that may hit home with the teen-ager, but plainly shows that the librarian herself is beyond the help of cautionary tales.In between are a number of cracking good yarns, beautifully illustrated with 13 full page wood engravings, well worth the price of the book by themselves alone. I liked them so much I looked the artist up on the web, and found the prints can be purchased at reasonable prices. What a great Christmas gift for a 12 or 13 year old! A good book and an original print!The stories range from simple ghost stories (Ghost Story, Haunted House) to moralizing tales about the ill effects of meanness, accidental, immature, or habitual (Father's Foxy Neighbor, Snakefeathers, A Conveyance of Lions).One finds an Australian aboriginal myth about the origin of crows and mockingbirds transposed into modern suburbia, an African tale about bestial births transposed into a modern city. In addition to the animal theme running through these - often old, and some well known - stories, the narrative's bringing them into direct relation to the people telling them is the book's main characteristic. It can be a charming one, as when a boy in love with a teacher finds out the she herself is the descendant of a woman who was once a fish, or a horrifying one, as we learn that the vice principal himself is the anti-hero of a tale he tells about a childhood bully.Only one moment in the book disappointed me, to the point of real anger. The pompous Language Arts teacher says, "I wrote my doctoral thesis on Chaucer. Why should I care about some ancient tales of talking animals." Had someone somewhere else in the book pointed out that Chaucer was a wonderful tale teller, not least of all in his wonderful tale of Chaunticleer, the talking rooster and his brides, this passage would have been a wonderful sendup of teacher, a stroke of ironic genius. As it is, the book's readers may be left thinking that Chaucer is as pompous an ass as Dr. Proctor (pun no doubt intended), and end up missing out on one of life's greatest pleasures. No doubt the learned Barbara Ann Porte intended the irony, but I wish she had made it available to her 12 and up readers.