Module Three- Baboushka and the Three Kings, Ruth Robbins

Robbins, Ruth. Baboushka and the Three Kings. Parnassus Press, 1960.

Summary
Baboushak and the Three Kings is a Christmas folktale from Russia. Baboushka lives in a small cottage by herself and one night while cleaning, is visited by three kings who seek a child. They ask Baboushka to join them in their quest, but she is too tired and asks them to wait until morning. They declare their search is too important and cannot rest, so they leave her. Baboushka regrets her decision and decides to find the child too. She cannot find the tracks of the three kings and becomes lost. She asks everyone she meets if they have seen the child, but no one has. Legend has it that every winter Baboushka goes searching for the child again, leaving humble but precious presents for other children along the way.


Impressions

Frankly, I'm amazed this won the Caldecott. The illustrations look like they were drawn by a small child with a bleeding Crayola marker. Faces of the characters are frightening and their heads are too large for their bodies. The illustrations are overly simplistic, geometric, and too modern for a traditional Christmas folktale from Russia.
While an adult can peice together the information at hand to understand this is a Christmas story, a child probably would not. The reader is left with a very dissapointing and anticlimactic end to the story.
Reviewers don't have much to say either:



Reviews- It was very hard to find reviews for this one!
Baboushka and the Three Kings. Good Media, Good Kids. University of Notre Dame. Retrieved September 11, 2010, from http://goodmedia.nd.edu/reviews/review.cfm?id=1574.
"Baboushka and the Three Kings is about morality. Moral reasoning in the story focuses on self-concern and concern for relationships. The theme of this story is it is good to keep our eyes and ears open, so that we don't miss opporunities."


Baboushka and the Three Kings. Editorial Reviews. Amazon.com: Retrieved September 11, 2010, from http://www.amazon.com/Baboushka-Three-Kings-Ruth-Robbins/dp/039527673X.
"The strikingly effective pictures are distinctive in design and rich in color."


Suggestion for Library Use
Get this for your library's Caldecott winner collection. I doubt there is much other use for it as most libraries cannot have official Christmas storytimes, Christmas featured books, etc.
You might be able to get away with putting this in a Christmas around the world, or Holidays around the world. It could be placed in an Eastern European display, but it wouldn't make much sense out of the Christmas context.