Magic Pebble

Sylvester and the Magic Pebble Written by: William Steig
Sylvester Duncan lives a normal Donkey life as a collector of unusual pebbles until one rainy Saturday at the lake when he finds a magic red pebble. Realizing that this pebble is magical he runs home to tell his parents but he is caught off guard by a hungry, mean looking lion! In a panic he wishes to be a rock so that he may escape the lion; Sylvester may have escaped the lion but now he’s stuck as a rock. Seasons pass and worried parents turn hopeless until the very end of the story when the rock is now the picnic area of his parents who find the pebble and wish to see their son yet again. The pebble does its magic and the family is reunited with a great story to tell!
The plot of the story is easy to follow, flows naturally, and will hold an elementary student’s attention from one event to the next. Once you get close to the end you hope that the parents do find the rock and wonder how they will come about changing Sylvester back to a Donkey and author does this easily and the event wasn’t forced. The art work captures the attention of the reader with its brightness and childlike appearance. A weakness about this is story however; is that it does have a picture that displays police as pigs and because of its time of publishing, this picture made was considered offensive to many police and this book was censored. I feel like in the times we live now children wouldn’t catch this as a bad aspect of this story. They may catch the stereotype of police being pigs but I don’t think they will get it at the age this book is intended for. If I were using this book in a classroom setting I could use this as a beginning book to the genre of fantasy or I could use this is a prompt to a project about “if you had one wish what would it be” where the children can think about what they would want if they had their own magic pebble.