My favorite book that I’ve actually done that’s not a Madeline book is called Harold’s Tail, and it’s about a squirrel who lives in New York City in a little park. He’s got the perfect life. He’s the only squirrel that lives in the park and there’s this kindly old gentleman who feeds him his nuts every morning.
And one morning Harold looks up, and he goes down and sees that the garbage can has been knocked over and he sees there’s a rat in it. And he goes over to the rat and he says, like, ‘Excuse me rat. You’ve had your fun here, but it’s time for you to go. We don’t like your kind around here.’
So the rat turns to him and says, ‘Oh, you think you’re better then me?’ He goes, ‘Let me tell you something. The only thing you have that I don’t have is that big fluffy tail.’
And the squirrel says, ‘Well, while it’s true I do have a fluffy tail, I also have a much better personality
and frankly, you stink.’
So the rat says, ‘Hey, fluffy boy! The only personality you have is in that tail.’
So they wind up breaking into a barbershop and taking a razor and taking off all of the squirrel’s tail hair.
And they’re gluing the fur onto the rat’s and they go back to the man who feeds Harold every morning and the man sees him with his naked tail and beats him off with his cane and then the rat comes along with his big splendid tail and he showers him with nuts.
And
well, Harold realizes that he was wrong. And he has to spend the next year waiting for his tail to grow back, learning what it’s like to live life as a rat on the mean streets of New York.
So I just found that actually not having the book, just freed me to tell the story in such a more lively way and I didn’t actually need to depend on pictures, I didn’t need to depend on the text.
