Seeger sums it up in a postscript: “every community must learn to manage its giants.” Hays, who illustrated the original (1986), creates colorful, if unfinished-looking, scenes featuring a notably multicultural human cast and a towering Cubist fantasy of a giant.

How to avoid Abiyoyo’s destruction now? Sing the monster to sleep, then make it a peaceful, tree-planting member of the community, of course. But the rock that Abiyoyo obligingly flings aside smashes the wand. Call on Abiyoyo, suggests the granddaughter of the man with the magic wand, then just “Zoop Zoop” him away again. Faced with yearly floods and droughts since they’ve cut down all their trees, the townsfolk decide to build a dam-but the project is stymied by a boulder that is too huge to move. The seemingly ageless Seeger brings back his renowned giant for another go in a tuneful tale that, like the art, is a bit sketchy, but chockful of worthy messages. It's an entertaining effort- just not up to that superlative first book. Still, the situation and dialogue are irreverently comical and Johnson's caricatures are adroitly satirical. Meanwhile, Johnson's paintings, though he adopts some of Lane Smith's fey menace and induces tension by canting his perspectives, lack Smith's wit, imagination, and masterful sense of design. But the conclusion-glad to get back to his princess, he kisses her and they both become happy frogs-seems limp and unmotivated. The picture of the erstwhile frog and his princess bickering (``Stop sticking your tongue out like that'' ``How come you never want to go down to the pond anymore?'') is genuinely funny, and the prince's quest for a witch to turn him back into a frog-during which he runs into witches from several other tales-is amusing. Wolf) of The True Story of the Three Little Pigs (1989) assays another humorous embroidery of a traditional tale with somewhat less notable success.

The frog prince jon scieszka