Fables
by Arnold Lobel
Summary
Fables gathers twenty short animal stories Arnold Lobel invented himself rather than adapted from any older tradition, each one running a single page of text facing a full page painting, and each closing with a moral in the old fable style. A crocodile who loves his tidy, orderly wallpaper more than his wife's chaotic garden learns something about the cost of order; a group of ducks nearly falls for a fox's flattery before catching on; a mouse sets out on a hard, discouraging trip to the seashore and discovers the trip itself was the point. The morals range from plainly stated lessons, "without a doubt, there is such a thing as too much order," to gentler, more open ended ones about persistence and happiness, and none of the twenty stories connects to any other, so the book can be read one fable at a time rather than straight through.
Lobel illustrates in luminous, carefully shaded color, giving his crocodiles, ostriches, hippopotamuses, and other animal characters expressive, faintly comic faces that keep the tone playful even when a moral lands with real weight. The pictures do as much of the storytelling as the text, often supplying a visual joke, a sly expression, a background detail, that the spare prose leaves out entirely.
Because each fable is short and self contained, the book works well as a bedtime read one story at a time rather than cover to cover, suited to five through nine year olds who can sit with a short, pointed story and talk about what its moral actually means. Adults reading aloud tend to notice a dry, grown up wit running under Lobel's morals that younger listeners catch only some of, which is part of why the book rewards repeated readings as children get older.
Historical Context & Significance
Fables won the 1981 Caldecott Medal, the year Ilse Plume's The Bremen Town Musicians, Molly Bang's The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher, Joseph Low's Mice Twice, and Donald Crews's Truck all took Honor Book recognition, an unusually crowded field of four. Reception at the time split sharply: the American Library Association praised the book's "fresh, unexpected morals" and its "complete and humorous" illustrations, and Publishers Weekly called it "the most remarkable" of Lobel's books, while Kirkus Reviews dismissed it as lacking "wit, wisdom, style, or originality." Horn Book took a middle position, praising its "original flavor."
Lobel was already established as the author and illustrator of the Frog and Toad books, an entirely different, gentler series of easy readers, and Fables represented a more ambitious, purely visual project he wrote and painted himself. The retrospective critic Barbara Bader later wrote that in Lobel's "spontaneous, cartoony sketches" the work "would have had more sparkle and less ponderousness", a minority view against the medal's own verdict that has kept the book's reputation more contested than most Caldecott winners.