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Summary
Summary
Master storyteller Patricia C. McKissack transports us to the front porch-a place where lightning bugs flash, lemonade is poured, and tales about slickster-tricksters are an every-night treat for the whole family to enjoy.
Here you can listen to "porch lies"-tales filled with humor and exaggeration-about characters like:
-A one-of-a-kind trickster, Dooley Hunter, who tells such a whopper at the State Liars' Contest that it becomes known as the best lie ever told.
-A downright wily individual by the name of Noble "Cake" Norris, who some folks believe may have died twenty-seven times.
-A little old lady slickster folks call Aunt Gran, who comes face to face with Frank and Jesse James, the two most notorious outlaws in America.
Rich in African American history, these unforgettable tales range from sidesplittingly funny to spine-chillingly spooky. So hop on the porch swing and listen up-there's a story just starting. . . .
Author Notes
Patricia C. McKissack was born in Smyrna, Tennessee on August 9, 1944. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Tennessee State University in 1964 and a master's degree in early childhood literature and media programming from Webster University in 1975. After college, she worked as a junior high school English teacher and a children's book editor at Concordia Publishing.
Since the 1980's, she and her husband Frederick L. McKissack have written over 100 books together. Most of their titles are biographies with a strong focus on African-American themes for young readers. Their early 1990s biography series, Great African Americans included volumes on Frederick Douglass, Marian Anderson, and Paul Robeson. Their other works included Black Hands, White Sails: The Story of African-American Whalers and Days of Jubilee: The End of Slavery in the United States. Over their 30 years of writing together, the couple won many awards including the C.S. Lewis Silver Medal, a Newbery Honor, nine Coretta Scott King Author and Honor awards, the Jane Addams Peace Award, and the NAACP Image Award for Sojourner Truth: Ain't I a Woman?. In 1998, they received the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement.
She also writes fiction on her own. Her book included Flossie and the Fox, Stitchin' and Pullin': A Gee's Bend Quilt, A Friendship for Today, and Let's Clap, Jump, Sing and Shout; Dance, Spin and Turn It Out! She won the Newberry Honor Book Award and the King Author Award for The Dark Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural in 1993 and the Caldecott Medal for Mirandy and Brother Wind. She dead of cardio-respiratory arrest on April 7, 2017 at the age of 72.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5 Up-These 10 literate stories make for great leisure listening and knowing chuckles. Pete Bruce flatters a baker out of a coconut cream pie and a quart of milk; Mingo may or may not have anything smaller than a 100-dollar bill to pay his bills; Frank and Jesse James, or "the Howard boys," help an old woman against the KKK-ish Knights of the White Gardenia; and Cake Norris wakes up dead one day-again. Carrilho's eerie black-and-white illustrations, dramatically off-balance, lit by moonlight, and elongated like nightmares, are well-matched with the stories. The tales are variously narrated by boys and girls, even though the author's preface seems to set readers up for a single, female narrator in the persona of McKissack herself. They contain the "essence of truth but are fiction from beginning to end," an amalgam of old stories, characters, jokes, setups, and motifs. As such, they have no provenance. Still, it would have helped readers unfamiliar with African-American history to have an author's note helping separate the "truth" of these lies that allude to Depression-era African-American and Southern traditions. That aside, they're great fun to read aloud and the tricksters, sharpies, slicksters, and outlaws wink knowingly at the child narrators, and at us foolish humans.-Susan Hepler, formerly at Burgundy Farm Country Day School, Alexandria, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Horn Book Review
(Primary, Intermediate) It's a clever idea: McKissack presents ten original trickster stories tailored for children with a child narrator in each one, for immediate and lasting identification. McKissack contextualizes the stories, too, more fully and circumstantially than she did in The Dark-Thirty (rev. 3/93). ""Change,"" for instance, is attributed to a life insurance agent on his rounds, who was once a student of ""Mama Frances's sister Aunt Will...at Tennessee State."" ""Change"" also demonstrates what makes the best of these stories work so well for kids. The scene is a barbershop where Jesse, the ten-year-old narrator, shines shoes. The regulars are grousing about one Mingo Cass, who cons them out of small sums by always claiming to have only a hundred-dollar bill and asking for change. When he pulls the same stunt on Jesse, the men erupt and, putting out their nickels and dimes, bet he has no such thing. Then, to everyone's surprise but Jesse's.... Time and again the narrator either believes in the trickster when no one else does, or alone sees through him. Two of the longer, quasi-legendary stories (a riff on the hell-bent-musician theme made immortal by Arna Bontemps in Lonesome Boy; a farrago about a Klan-like outfit and the James brothers) haven't the same snap. But ""A Grave Situation,"" notwithstanding its echoes of Driving Miss Daisy, is a real cliffhanger; ""The Best Lie Ever Told"" (""I aine never told no lie before"") scores on its crafty staging; and the concluding two-part story about rascally Cake Norris, on the ascent into Heaven and the descent into Hell, is a hum-dinger. Grandly melodramatic black-and-white illustrations capture the mood of the stories and the flavor of the period. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Gr. 3-5. Like McKissack's award-winning The Dark Thirty 0 (1992), the nine original tales in this uproarious collection draw on African American oral tradition and blend history and legend with sly humor, creepy horror, villainous characters, and wild farce. McKissack based the stories on those she heard as a child while sitting on her grandparents' porch; now she is passing them on to her grandchildren. Without using dialect, her intimate folk idiom celebrates the storytelling among friends, neighbors, and family as much as the stories themselves. "Some folk believe the story; some don't. You decide for yourself." Is the weaselly gravedigger going to steal a corpse's jewelry, or does he know the woman is really still alive? Can bespectacled Aunt Gran outwit the notorious outlaw Jesse James? In black and white, Carrilho's full-page illustrations--part cartoon, part portrait in silhouette--combine realistic characters with scary monsters. History is always in the background (runaway slaves, segregation cruelty, white-robed Klansmen), and in surprising twists and turns that are true to trickster tradition, the weak and exploited beat powerful oppressors with the best lies ever told. Great for sharing, on the porch and in the classroom. --Hazel Rochman Copyright 2006 Booklist
