by Ana M. Mojico
“The Great Big Enormous Turnip” by Alexei Tolstoy is an invitation to experience cooperative work. Preschoolers and children attending their first years at primary school will be witness to the success of pulling up together through Helen Oxenbury’s illustrations.
The various characters of this classic Russian folktale join forces and help each other to pull a huge turnip out. An old man plants a turnip in his farm and it grows and grows till it becomes enormous. When he tries to remove the great vegetable, he realizes he is not strong enough to do so and he asks an old woman to help him. After trying desperately, she calls her granddaughter who tells a dog if he could lend her a hand, who asks a cat, who finally is assisted by a little mouse. And all of them pull and pull again. Unexpectedly, the strength of this little and weak animal is also necessary at last to pull the giant turnip out.
The Soviet writer manages to convey the idea of cooperation by means of incremental repetition and parallelism. Tolstoy presents his characters one by one always performing the same task, pulling and pulling again. Intentionally, he repeats it rhythmically as the story progresses making “The Great Big Enormous Turnip” suitable and enjoyable for little children.
The acclaimed illustrator, Helen Oxenbury, succeeds in creating a cumulative story through her detailed drawings. In every page, she presents a new character that joins the previous one and helps him to accomplish the same task. Finally, a long chain of different creatures, each one weaker and smaller than the other, is built in order to remove the great big enormous turnip. Oxenbury is able to communicate in images the moral meaning of the story.
Little children will enjoy this popular folktale and its expressive pictures while discovering that no matter how difficult a task is, even a great big enormous turnip can be pulled out if we pull up together.
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