Tadpole's Promise Synopsis
Where the willow meets the water, a tadpole met a caterpillar. They gazed into each other's tiny eyes and fell in love. 'Promise me that you will never change', the caterpillar says. And foolishly, the tadpole promises.
But as the seasons pass and he matures, his legs grow, and then his arms - and what happens to his beautiful rainbow friend? As he sits on his lily pad, digesting the butterfly he has just eaten, he little realises that now he will never know!
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781783445868 |
| Publication date: |
7th June 2018 |
| Author: |
Jeanne Willis |
| Illustrator: |
Tony Ross |
| Publisher: |
Andersen Press Ltd |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Suitable For: |
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| Other Genres: |
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Jeanne Willis Press Reviews
Unforgettable. - Guardian
I love this book so much - Giovanna Fletcher
Breaks the mould in form as well as content. - The Sunday Times
Beginning with pages that open vertically instead of horizontally, this tongue-in-cheek tale takes a typical love story and sets it squarely and amusingly on end. Ross's vibrantly hued pen-and-ink and watercolour cartoons depict the edge of the pond where a caterpillar and a tadpole meet and fall in love. . . Willis strikes the perfect balance between the deadpan telling and the humorously overblown dialogue shared by the star-crossed pair, while the artwork masterfully enhances each and every nuance. - The School Library Journal
For nourishment of grammatical and contextual awareness, a perfect book for reading aloud is Tony Ross' and Jeanne Willis' wicked little love story - Tadpole's Promise. It starts eloquently and promisingly: Where the willow meets the water a tadpole met a caterpillar. They gazed into each other's tiny eyes... and fell in love. She was his beautiful rainbow and he was her shiny black pearl. But then the tadpole promises the caterpillar he will never change thus ensuring the most captive of reading audiences as they watch the inevitable changes that unfold. The final gasp-making twist (student teachers have shrieked!) is all the funnier for being juxtaposed against such poetic language. -- Alison Kelly - Books for Keeps
About Jeanne Willis
Jeanne Willis is an award-winning children's author and scriptwriter. She wrote her first book when she was five - a slim volume about cats written in pencil and stitched together with a painfully blunt needle so that it looked like a 'real' book. After that, there was no turning back. Having been fired from her Saturday job - selling cowboy boots on the Kings Road - for chewing gum, and after a brief career as a reptile vet's assistant, she worked as a copywriter and had her first picture book published at the age of 21 (which she wrote whilst pretending to be busy creating adverts for cognac).
She has since written over 300 books and has won several awards, which are arranged in the attic where she works, along with her collection of caterpillars, pink-toed tarantula skins and live locusts. Jeanne has a keen interest in Natural History and has lost count of the number of species featured in her books, including everything from slugs to sloths. She is currently into corvids - especially Nosy Crows.
Jeanne has won the Silver Medal Smarties Prize for Tadpole's Promise, the Nasen Special Needs Award for Susan Laughs, the Sheffield Children's Book Award for Who’s in The Loo and the Red House Children's Book Award for Bottoms Up. Jeanne has also worked on scripts for TV, including Polly Pocket and The Slow Norris, and a pilot TV series for Dr Xargle.
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