Okay, after I chose this book based on the description from Amazon.com and checked it out from the library I opened it and saw a bunch of text. I'm not always a big fan of picture books with pages of just text from top to bottom, but once I got started I was hooked. In Ackamarackus, Julius Lester's Sumptuously Silly Fantastically Funny Fables he shows a lot of nonsensical humor. There are individual stories included that have nothing to do with one another, other than they are all funny. The ideas are very clever, such as a bee who loses his buzz and an alligator who doesn't like the heat so he moves to Vermont. All of the stories have animals as the main characters. The author also writes as if he is talking directly to the reader sometimes.
There are little life lessons to be learned at the conclusion of each of the six stories. Here are two of them that can be found at the end of "How the Lion Became King of the Jungle":
1. Appreciate somebody for who he is instead of getting upset about who he isn't.
2. You can be a genius at anything.
One thing that breaks up the pages of text is the use of phrases written in a different colored font instead of an entire page of black ink. The illustrations are colorful with exaggerated characters. I would recommend this book be read aloud because there is a lot of opportunity for expressive reading. I think a lot of young readers would put this book back down once they saw the amount of text.
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