The Rooster Crows
by Maud and Miska Petersham
Summary
This collection gathers American nursery rhymes, counting out chants, skipping rope rhymes and finger games that children once passed around on playgrounds and front porches rather than read from a page, familiar verses like Little Miss Muffet and Star Light, Star Bright sitting alongside less famous ones. Maud and Miska Petersham illustrated each page in soft pencil work restricted to a handful of colors, grey, white, green, orange and red, alternating full page scenes with smaller decorative touches, and several of the finger game pages include small hand drawn diagrams showing a child exactly how to move their fingers along with the words.
It works best read the way the rhymes were originally used, a few at a time, acted out with the accompanying hand motions rather than read straight through cover to cover, and very young children respond to it more as a piece of playground culture caught on paper than as a story with characters. Parents should know that the book's original 1945 edition included illustrations built on racially demeaning caricature that later printings quietly removed, worth knowing if an older, unrevised copy turns up in a used bookstore or a family collection rather than a current edition.
The Petershams had already spent more than a decade illustrating other writers' books, including Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories and a widely used edition of Heidi, before turning fully to books they wrote and illustrated together, and that long apprenticeship in matching pictures to someone else's words shows in how precisely each rhyme here gets its own small visual joke.
Historical Context & Significance
The Rooster Crows won the 1946 Caldecott Medal for a book The Macmillan Company published in 1945. That year's runners up were Leonard Weisgard's Little Lost Lamb, Marjorie Torrey's Sing Mother Goose, Ruth Chrisman Gannett's My Mother Is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World and Kurt Wiese's You Can Write Chinese.
A 1967 review in Horn Book Magazine praised the Petershams' pictures as delightful and soft in color, with plenty of humor, and their writing as simple and smooth, a description that held for the book's reputation for decades afterward. The Petershams had already been Caldecott runners up once before, for An American ABC in 1942, part of a long running series of illustrated books about America they made together, before this collection finally won them the medal itself. Later editions of The Rooster Crows removed illustrations from the original that depicted racial caricature, a revision made without much public documentation of exactly when it happened, itself a reminder that a book's printing history can be harder to pin down than its plot.