Yertle the turtle
1958
- stories in rhyme
- juvenile literature
- children's stories
- children's poetry
- turtles
- children's stories, american
- turtles in fiction
- spanish language materials
- translations into spanish
- jealousy
The story
Includes three humorous stories in verse; Yertle the Turtle, Gertrude McFuzz, and The Big Brag.
What it’s like
Bouncy, sing-song anapestic verse that rolls off the tongue, with bold, saturated illustrations in Seuss's loose ink-and-colour style: wobbly-legged turtles stacked into a teetering tower against open, pale skies, and a bird in a fluffy tail-feather costume posed in rounded, cartoonish panels. The voice is mock-grand and playful, the kind of read-aloud that gets funnier with each pause and rhyme. Each of the three short tales is brisk, a few pages long, moving quickly from setup to a punchy comic turn, so it suits a lively read at bedtime, a quick sitting with a small child, or a spare half hour on a lazy afternoon. The mood is cheeky and light, with a gentle undercurrent of pride being humbled and vanity puffed up and deflated. Nothing frightening or violent occurs; the sharpest moments are only mild comic bluster. It is ideal for early readers and the adults reading to them, and for anyone who wants nonsense rhymes with a wink of satire, including Spanish-language readers who enjoy a bilingual or translated edition.
More books like Yertle the turtle
Closest in mood, pacing and theme. Tell us why you loved Yertle the turtleand we’ll explain which ones fit you.
