Caps for Sale! A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys and their Monkey Business

Reading List
Written By Rebecca Grabill

Caps for Sale: A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys and their Monkey Business by Esphyr Slobdkina. HarperCollins, 1940.

Slobodkina’s use of an adult protagonist empowers children one cap at a time. As he tries to reclaim his caps from the mischievous monkeys, the child-reader is one step ahead, seeing the solution to his problem before he does. The author highlights this through simple illustrations that make use of the same or similar scenes and angles in most spreads, drawing attention to the small details that change. Throw in some number and color concepts, onomatopoeia, repetition, occasional internal rhyme, and a classic is born.

I’m still slightly bothered that the man never got his lunch. A lesson in delayed gratification perhaps?

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Rebecca Grabill

Rebecca has been writing since childhood, her first book about a kitten published between homemade cardboard covers in second grade. Although she studied religion and philosophy in university, she continued writing, earning an MFA from Hamline University and publishing multiple picture books (no longer with homemade covers) and a collection of poetry with a variety of New York and independent publishers. She has also published a wide array of fiction, essays, and poetry in magazines and journals and photographs for Getty Images. She balances writing with homeschooling the younger of her six children, launching her young adults, church activities, and overseeing a small flock of chickens in rural West Michigan.

www.rebeccagrabill.com
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