Through the Grapevine

Winner of the Storytelling World Award

Have you ever played the game "Telephone" (or "Gossip"), where one person whispers a sentence to another and that person whispers it to the next? If you have, you know that by the time the sentence gets around a circle of people, it has almost always changed, sometimes drastically. In the same way, stories are passed "through the grapevine," they grow and change and take on many forms.

The stories in this book show just how powerful the grapevine can be. Most of them have been making rounds for hundreds of years. Many of them are found in slightly (or very) different forms in countries thousands of miles apart. All of them are fun to read out loud, and especially fun to tell. Each story has tips for telling the story without the book, and the authors encourage budding tellers to "take these stories and make them your own." These multicultural stories will teach readers the importance of caring, fairness and respect.