Sweet and Sour - IgniteLit

Sweet and Sour by Carol Kendall and Yao-Wen Li

Title: Sweet and Sour
Author: Carol Kendall & Yao-Wen Li
Major Themes: Fairy Tales, Short Stories, China
Synopsis: Twenty-four stories from all periods of China’s history illustrate human nature, and will make the reader laugh or cry.

I bought a couple of new books to add to the ones we already had for the language arts/reading course I’m having one of my sons do this year. The curriculum had been updated since the last time I had a child go through it, some 10 or 12 years ago, so we didn’t have everything that was used. I don’t mind an excuse to buy more books, though! Now, I’m working on reading the new ones before he gets to them, so that I know what is coming up. The first one I chose was Sweet and Sour. It’s a very interesting collection of stories from China.

There are 24 stories in this little book. Some only cover a couple of pages, some are much longer. They range from one told a few hundred years before Christ to some told within the last couple of hundred years. All are guaranteed to make a reader or listener stop to think for a moment about what the story means. Some will make you laugh, and some will make you cry. All show human nature the way it really is!

I was surprised at how many of the stories were familiar. Many of them have been told in various forms in picture books that we have, or the theme has been used in literature. For example, a story about catching a thief used a variation of a technique that is in By the Great Horn Spoon, one of our favorite American tall tales! Another reminded me of an Aesop’s fable, but with a different twist. Some are very similar to European fairy tales. Do be careful which children you hand Sweet and Sour to. Some of the stories are somewhat gruesome, and several include people or animals who have been bewitched.

WARNING: “The Serpent-Slayer” involves girls being fed to a giant worm. In “Bagged Wolf,” a wolf wants to eat a man. A horse is killed in “The Betrothal.” A baby is fed to a cow in “The Piebald Calf.”