4.5 Stars

Quarto is back with another lovely collection of 50 tales from around the world, and this time it is Nature stories! The stories are categorized into different aspects of Nature:

• Flower, Fruit & Seed
• Wind & Weather
• Creatures Great & Small
• Sun, Moon & the Stars
• Lead and Tree
• Lake, River, Ocean
• Desert, Mountain, Stone

There are stories from many countries, and two from my own (India). How Lightning Began and The Tree God are Indian nature stories, though it makes me sad to admit that I haven’t read them before.

As with other folktales, most nature stories impart a moral lesson about vice and virtues. Themes like greed, jealousy, selfishness, acceptance, sharing, love, kindness, selfless sacrifice, etc., are common across the stories.

The Stone Soup (Portugal) and the Jack and Beanstalk were a part of my childhood. The last story, The Fire on the Mountain (Ethiopia), has been retold among the Akbar & Birbal Tales and Tenali Ramakrishna Tales and is a popular one in my country. The Six Brothers (New Zealand) has teeny similarities to Indian folklore about the rainbow (though the sky and earth never get to marry or have kids in our version).

The illustrations are typical Quarto style, the kind I’ve come to appreciate in these collections. They complement the stories without taking the focus away from the theme or the moral of each story. Kids will enjoy reading the stories and using the illustrations to imagine the rest.

Listing a few of my favorites below:
• The Acorn and the Pumpkin (France),
• The Twelve Months (Czech),
• How Freshwater Mussel Brought Rain (Africa),
• Light Daughter of Snow (Russia),
• The Girl Who Helped Thunder (NA, Muskogee),
• The Honest Penny (Norway),
• Green Dragon Pond (China),
• A Garment for the Moon (East Europe)

To sum up, A World Full of Nature Stories is a great book for kids and adults who love folktales. The collection is assorted to keep every reader interested.

I received an ARC from NetGalley, Frances Lincoln Children's Books, and Quarto Publishing Group and am voluntarily leaving a review.

#AWorldFullofNatureStories #NetGalley