How Many Donkeys?: An Arabic Counting Tale

K-Gr 2-In this Saudi folktale, Jouha loads ten donkeys with dates to sell at the market. As he rides along, he counts nine and believes one is lost. Yet when he walks, he counts all ten and is grateful that the missing donkey is back. Alternately lucky and unlucky, depending on whether he walks or rides, Jouha sells his dates and returns home with all of his donkeys. Arabic numbers from one to ten are written from right to left at the bottom of the pages, both in Arabic and in English transliteration, and invite youngsters to count along with the silly date merchant. (Readers can listen to Taibah pronounce these numbers on MacDonald's Web site.) Full-color paintings expand the repetitive text, tracing the journey of ten distinctly different donkeys across the desert landscape and indicating the passage of time with the position of the sun, the color of the sky, and the size of the shadows underneath the donkeys. In an opening note, MacDonald documents the many variants of this folktale, including Denys Johnson-Davies's Goha the Wise Fool (Philomel, 2005), which is set in Egypt. For those libraries with large folklore collections or those looking for unusual counting books.

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