You May Already Be A Winner!

The Fortune Tellers by Lloyd Alexander

Or is it by telling people what they want to hear and convincing them to hand over large sums of money?

When I tell you that this picture book is written by Lloyd Alexander, author of the famed Prydain Chronicles, you'll probably expect the story's moral to be the first route. This is, after all, the man who wrote about sacrifice, honor, and keeping one's word. This delightful picture book, The Fortune-Tellers, shows us that Alexander is full of surprises.

Eschew thoughts of a moral in this book. This is a tale set in Cameroon, Africa that is told for the unadulterated purpose of making the reader laugh. It is almost a fable in that none of the characters have names, though it is a fable lacking the tag line telling you what you should have learned.

The story begins on a hot, dry day as a carpenter speculates about his future and whether life promises anything more than dreary labor. Word reaches him that a fortune teller is predicting the future in a cloth merchant's shop town. As the carpenter arrives in the shop, the fortune teller greets him by saying that the carpenter is about to give the fortune teller lots of money, but that should be no difficulty for a man destined to be rich. This excites the carpenter who asks if he, then, can expect great fortune. He is told:

Rich you will surely be.On one condition: That you earn large sums of money."

And so goes the series of predictions. He'll marry his true love-on the condition that they find each other and she agrees. He'll develop fame as soon as he is well-known. The carpenter, thrilled to hear his dreams will be realized, pays scant attention to the disclaimers that make the predictions statements of guaranteed truth.

He bounds from the shop, only to realize he has many more questions. When he returns, the old fortune teller is gone. The cloth merchant's wife appears and is convinced that the fortune teller has turned himself from old to young. We then watch as the predictions come true for the carpenter-for he takes the old fortune teller's place and proceeds to tell fortunes the way the older man did. He simply tells everyone what he or she wants to hear. He becomes wealthy, famous, and marries the beautiful cloth merchant's daughter.

As for the old fortune teller, he meets a pretty terrible fate, though Alexander makes it so absurd that you want to giggle even as you feel sorry for him. The carpenter remains grateful to the man whom he saw as the harbinger and vehicle of his good fortune and sent good wishes to a man who could no longer receive them.

The tale manages to maintain a humorous tone without ever mocking its unnamed characters. The absurdity is subtle, subtle enough that we can all recognize within ourselves the desire to buy into the absurdity.

Now I have to make a confession. This review has aged for a few days because I couldn't figure out what to do with it. I found the book charming and funny. My husband, son, and I all read it together several times during the period we had it checked out from the library. Since I had such a favorable reaction to it, I thought that there surely must be more I could put into the review to tell you why I liked it so much. Though this may sound like a cop-out, I finally concluded that to over-analyze this book would destroy its charm and miss the point. It is the type of story you share around a campfire, that you tell your children to make them laugh and encourage them to think critically enough to see why the ignored logic makes for good humor.

In this day of computers, some of the romanticism of The Fortune-Tellers story would be lost. Well, not the story itself, but the story of the story. Published in 1992, Alexander actually wrote it many years earlier. He calls it his "literary discovery" even though he was the one who penned the manuscript pages. After writing them, though, they got misplaced, or set aside, or lost. However it happened, fifteen years passed before his wife Janine rescued the manuscript from under the eaves of the attic and the book was birthed for the rest of us.

Also worth mentioning is the outstanding illustrations of The Fortune-Tellers as the vivid portrayals are what continue to stick out in my memory. The illustrator is Trina Schart Hymen. Those of you who follow children's literature may recognize that name. She won Caldecott medals in 1984 for Little Red Riding Hood and in 1985 for Saint George and the Dragon.

It was her influence on Lloyd Alexander that caused the story to be set in Cameroon. When Hymen's daughter married a man from Cameroon, she became aware of the preponderance of white heroe s and heroines. She convinced Alexander to set the story in Cameroon, which he was able to do by changing a few words in the story. Hymen said her illustrations were done from memory for her grandson Michau as a way of showing him his father's home. Hymen had visited Cameroon twice, describing how, "the silica in the air appears like glitter causing everything to reverberate with color and light. The result is a mood of light airiness awash with color." She reproduces that mood in her paintings.

Overall, The Fortune-Tellers is a fun book to read as a family. It isn't steeped in great meaning or serious overtones, but neither is it fluff with no purpose. It is a story that is written