Wombat & Fox: Tales of the City

by Terry Denton

Book Overview

In the big city, Wombat and Fox have many adventures. They don't go looking for trouble, but the city is a surprising place and trouble and mishaps have a way of finding them. This collection contains... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1933605812
• ISBN13: 9781933605814
• Release Date: September 2008
• Publisher: Kane/Miller Book Publishers
• Length: 124 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 7.8"
• Age Range: 8 to 10 years
• Grade Range: Grades 3 to 5

Customer Reviews

Your right. His left.

The old don't-judge-a-book-by-its-cover rule. It gets me every time. Of course I judge books by their covers! I'm a children's librarian with a particular kind of taste in titles. I know what I like and I don't have time to read and review books that don't look like they're my cup of tea. How does this system work out for me? Most of the time it seems to work out just fine. If I'm passing on fabulous books then I never know it because I didn't read them. I came half a sliver of a hair away from missing Wombat and Fox too. Oh sure, I gave the cover a little half glance but the art wasn't my style so I didn't think much about it. Someone had to really talk it up to me to get me interested too. Fortunately, the key to Wombat an Fox is that once you read even so much as a sentence, you are sucked in wholly and completely without a hope or a prayer of escape. So it is that I am head over heels in love with this smart and snappy little early chapter book from Australia, in spite of my continuing cover prejudice. In three short stories we follow the misadventures of good friends Wombat and Fox. In "Wombat's Lucky Dollar", Wombat locates a coin on the side of the road that he is convinced will bring him luck. Unfortunately a run in with an angry ice cream vendor, a water rat, the Hippo Sisters, and others leads to nothing but trouble. Fox is convinced that the dollar is unlucky, but one wombat's misfortune can be a bandicoot's lucky day. In "Golden Cleat Fox", Fox discovers that he has a miraculous inability to kick a soccer ball into its goal. When the local Five Monkeys come by and steal the ball, Fox finds a way to accomplish all his goals, both literally and figuratively. Finally in "A Hot Night in the City", Wombat and Fox must endure an escalating series of adventures before they find a way to beat the seemingly inescapable heat of the summer. The same person who recommended this book to me in the first place had a very good point about it that I'd like to paraphrase here. She said that there are some early chapter books out there that you read to children. They make for excellent teacher reads or bedtime stories but they're not necessarily something a child would pick up on their own for fun. Sheep And Goat by Marleen Westra or Toys Go Out by Emily Jenkins are excellent examples of this kind of book. Then there are stories like this one. Talk about readability. I could engage in long convoluted sentences to convince you as to why this book is so charming or I could merely reprint the book's first eight sentences instead. And since the first eight sentences were what convinced me to keep reading in the first place, it seems only fair to show them to you now: "This is a story of what happened to Wombat on Tuesday. I could tell you about Monday, but nothing happened on Monday. So Tuesday it is. Wombat's phone was nearly out of minutes so he went to the mobile phone shop. He had never needed to get minutes before. He had no one much to phone. Excep