The Old Woman and Her Pig: An Appalachian Folktale

The Old Woman and Her Pig: An Appalachian Folktale

Retold by Margaret
Read MacDonald

Illustrator: John Kanzler

Publisher: Harper Collins  

Copyright Date: 2007

# of Pages: 32

Genre: Folktale

I was excited to come across another pig book in my quest to find traditional literature. I was interested to see the low sticker price, and it wasn't until I got home to read it that I discovered why it was marked so low.

The story starts off with an old woman going to town to get a pig after coming across some change she found on the street. She can’t get the pig to hop the fence, so she gets a dog to bite the pig. The dog won’t bite the pig, so she gets a stick to hit the dog. This process goes on way too long before there’s ever any resolution to the point that it becomes terrible mundane. I would not suggest getting this book.

The illustrator uses a combination of digital and acrylic painting. His colors are very warm and textures are very rounded and smooth. They weren’t anything terribly impressive, but you could tell that the illustrations have to make up where the story lacks.

If you really wanted to use this in a classroom, you could use this as a project on sequences. I could image someone using a large chart page to list and number each event, and then have students trace back the events. You could also use this in a conflict and resolution lesson.