Shadow Play, by Paul Fleishcman

Specifics
Shadow Play, by Paul Fleischman, Illustrated by Eric Beddows
Published by Harper and Row Publishers, 1990

Target Audience
Lexile level not shown
This book is mostly pictures, so younger ages would be able to read and follow it, especially for a read aloud. This book is probably kindergarten- 3rd grade range.

Summary
This book is about two children who go to a circus, and they have only twenty cents left to spend, so they go to a shadow play that only costs ten cents each. The show is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but the beast is a bull, and Beauty is the only person who can tame him. The children are invited backstage after the show, and they realize that the shadows that were telling the story were just big cutouts, being moved by the same man that sold them their tickets.

Evaluation
This book has amazing illustrations, all in black and white. It tells a beautiful story in a way that students may not have heard Beauty and the Beast before. The use of illustrations to show the story of Beauty taming the beast, making it easier for students who may have a harder time with reading words. The students could still understand what the story is without reading at all. The personifications of the beast could be talked about. This was a good story about different ways that a fairy tale can be told, and how some things are just shadows, even if you believe they are real. The characters fit the setting of a circus, because they were excited, even when they found out that the things making the shadows were actually just one man. The pictures in the book transported you to that play, following the way that they told Beauty and the Beast, in a way that involved not love, but a little girl calming an animal.

Lesson
The lesson for this book will be that not everything is what it appears to be. The activity can be, using a light, teaching the class a few shadow animals that they can make with their hands. They could then write about a time when they thought something was actually something totally different, such as a student thinking something looked like a monster, when it was actually just a chair or something like that. This can teach them to look into things and ask questions before making assumptions.