Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears

Verna Aardema retells a West African cumulative folktale that traces an entire night's chaos back to a single small lie. A mosquito tells an iguana a story so annoying that the iguana stuffs sticks in his own ears to block it out, and because he can no longer hear anything, the iguana fails to answer a python's greeting, which the python takes as such a bad sign that he panics and flees into a rabbit hole. The rabbit, startled by the python bursting in, runs off in a panic of her own, setting off a crow, who spreads an alarm across the whole forest that eventually reaches a monkey, whose careless leap through the trees accidentally kills a baby owl. The mother owl is so grief stricken that she stops hooting to wake the sun each morning, and when the animals finally gather to sort out who is really responsible for the whole chain of disaster, they trace it all the way back to the mosquito's very first lie. Rather than face the other animals' anger directly, the mosquito hides, and to this day, the story explains, she buzzes in people's ears to check whether everyone is still angry with her.

Leo and Diane Dillon illustrate the chain reaction in watercolor, airbrush, pastel and India ink, cutting friskets and vellum shapes at different angles to build up layered, richly patterned scenes of the African savanna and its animals. It reads well aloud to children around four to eight, its cause and effect chain, one small annoyance escalating step by step into real tragedy, giving the story a clear shape even for a first time listener working out how everything connects.