Title: Helen’s Ant Story
Subtitle: The happy ant family avoided the kitchen, until one didn’t!
Author: Virginia Paulsen
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 978-1-7283-2932-1
Genre: Illustrated Children’s Book
Pages: 32
Reviewed by: Barbara Miller
Pacific Book Review
Verbal stories often evolve with minor changes when told throughout generations, having details being embellished and new obstacles thrown into the adventure. This admittedly has been the case with Helen’s Ant Story, as author Virginia Paulsen even modestly calls herself the “storyteller” rather than claiming intellectual originality of this fable – albeit the moral has not been altered.
The story is about a family of ants – living at the baseboards of a kitchen, enjoying the daily feast of crumbs and scraps of food which fall onto the floor. Many different types of food are written about, but the jello makes for the most playful part of the fun-loving ants, frolicking in the orange gelatin. The ants love to slide down pieces of spaghetti, and enjoy mouthfuls of watermelon, strawberries and other delicacies of morsels of remnants of food dropped on the floor.
One day this younger ant risks his safety to go out to the kitchen floor, when all of a sudden, he gets swept up and thrown in the trash. The trash is then tossed into the garbage; the garbage picked up by the garbage truck; the truck goes to the dump; and the ant winds up in a world of stinky trash far away from his home. An unlikely sequence of events occurs where the ant is flown back by a bird – narrowly escaping death by avoiding being eaten by the young birds in the nest – and winds up in a tree in the backyard of the house he once lived in. Upon returning to the kitchen, he finds his parents and grandparents much older, and is told the moral of the story.
Although a bit creepy having ants as characters; because they are not the warm and fuzzy creatures such as a ladybug, butterfly or even a centipede may convey; nevertheless, they do have their own personalities and are very strong and tenacious. The book is enhanced by rudimentary artwork also created by the author, making this a conglomeration of her talent. Yet it is the theme of the book which is, of course, the highlight of the message. That moral is, “Obey your parents!”
Parents can read this, over-and-over to their children, scaring them in the challenges confronted by the ant in his journey and not heeding the lesson to obey his parents, thus accomplishing two goals at once. First giving kids a fanciful adventure to lull into beddy-by, and secondly, reinforcing their authority to tell their kids what to do – and what not to do. After all, what child will want to risk being tossed into the town dump and taken far, far away from their safe and happy home?
