Too Tall for Truth: Tall Tales - John Henry by Julius Lester

Reading List
Written By Rebecca Grabill

John Henry by Julius Lester. Dial, 1994.

An authentic, engaging voice mingles fantasy with reality.

Pinkney’s vivid artwork combines with Lester’s picturesque text to make the telling of the story every bit as “larger than life” as the subject of the story. Lester fills his pages with word pictures, “bat wings on tombstones” and personification, the sun flossing, the wind out of breath. Yet he tosses in modern items, “like the school bus is never going to come,” which walks the line between contextualizing the fable and distracting from it (I’d vote for distracting).

But with other similes, “mountain as big as hurt feelings,” Lester touches the child’s world. A fabulous example of a Tall Tale capturing a bit of culture and history.

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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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