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  • Chicken Joy on Redbean Road: A Bayou Country Romp
  • Deborah Stevenson
Martin, Jacqueline Briggs Chicken Joy on Redbean Road: A Bayou Country Romp; illus. by Melissa Sweet. Houghton, 200732p ISBN 0-618-50759-0$17.00 R* 5-8 yrs

When chicken measles takes the voice of the blue-headed rooster, his pragmatic owner, Mrs. Miser Vidrine, decides it's time for "quiet rooster stew." The brown hen, Miss Cleoma, decides on a "barnyard strategy" to save the rooster, and she takes off in search of Joe Beebee, the fiddler whose music is sure to restore a rooster's crow. With its unquestioned animal/human interaction and its repetition, this story, in Martin's quietly lyrical prose, has a folklike flavor. The tale garners additional suspense from its cutting back and forth between Miss Cleoma, who's trying to get directions to Joe Beebee's, and Mrs. Vidrine, who's slowly preparing the other ingredients for her rooster stew (keen-eyed viewers will note the barnyard influence in the repeated appearance of vegetables that distract Mrs. V from the rooster). The final festive party set to Joe Beebee's music is both a delicious celebration and a credible venue for solving the various problems—the rooster does indeed redis [End Page 337] cover his crow, while Mrs. Vidrine finds that vegetable stew is quite a salable item. The illustrations are a tasty stew in their own right, line, watercolor, and collage create a quirky world wherein cuddly, globose chickens utter Cajun exclamations in speech bubbles and chat readily with sharp-featured humans; compositions vary inventively, employing techniques such as comic-strip panels and overhead views, and a frontispiece gives a map of the neighborhood. There's just something irresistible about a good chicken story: pair this with Wattenberg's Henny-Penny (BCCB 5/00) for a hat trick about chickens with a mission.

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