1. Chanticleer and the fox

The story is about a rooster, named Chanticleer, who lives on the modest farm of a widow  and her daughters.
Chanticleer is a beautiful bird and he struts around among 7 hens.
One day he dreams that his coop is in danger but when he talks with one of the hens his fears go away.
However his dream was a precognition of the danger that would be coming. A fox was laying in wait.
One day the fox says to Chanticleer that he has a beautiful voice and wishes for the rooster to sing to him.
Chanticleer stands tall, stretches his neck and closes to eyes to sing when the fox grabs him by the neck and carries him off to his den.
This causes a big commotion, the cows, the sheep, the pigs, all the hens, the daughters and the widow run after the fox.
Even the geese and the bees get upset. As he is being carried off Chanticleer speaks to the fox begging to be let go and when the fox opens his mouth and responds
Chanticleer breaks free of his grip and flies up in a tree.
The rooster tells the fox that he will neveragain be tricked by flattery and the fox
responds that he should not have been so vain to let it ever happen.
However the fox has lost and he goes back in the forest and Chanticleer returns happily to his home to end the story.
I like this tale, because it is a fable. There are animals in it who speak and act like humans.
And there is a moral to the story that is made very clear at the end.
But it does have a happy ending, so the story itself is positive all around.
The illustrations won this book the Caldecott Medal in 1959 and it is not hard to see why.
There is a lot of attention to detail seen in every page. Chanticleer is indeed a beautiful specimen.
His tail feathers flow behind him as he walks and Cooney does an excellent job of showing his splendor.
illustrations are done only in a few colors though: red, orange, blue, green, and yellow. And there are only one shade of each.
Most illustrations use all the colors but some pictures have only one color in addition to black.
However, all of them are great and show the scenes well.
And the little things, like cows on a hillside in the background when the widow and daughters run off to chase the fox,
make the difference and show the effort put into the illustrations.
And I have values about this story , the values are

• the virtue of pointing out the folly of listening to
  flattery as well as the value of quick thinking on Chanticleer's part in a perilous situation.
  
• not greedy our self
  
• and we should think carefully before we do something.