Now back in print from the award-winning team behind Room on the Broom -- a very fishy story about very fishy stories! The little fish Tiddler comes late to school every day, but always with an elaborate excuse that charms his classmates -- and annoys his teacher! One day, as he's thinking up his next story, a net sweeps him up and hauls him far away. How will Tiddler find his way home? All he has to do is follow the trail of his biggest, fishiest story yet!For every parent or teacher who knows the boundless creativity of a perpetually late child, this book is sure to become the next read-aloud favorite from the bestselling author-illustrator team behind The Gruffalo and Room On the Broom . Kindergarten-Grade 3—Tiddler is a tiny fish with a propensity for tall tales. Habitually late for school, he offers a different excuse each day. He's been riding a seahorse, got trapped in a treasure chest, was captured by a squid, etc. The other students discount his stories, but Little Johnny Dory loves them and passes them on to his grandmother, who tells a crab, who tells a plaice, and so on. When Tiddler's daydreaming lands him far from home, it is the retracing of the trail of his own stories that leads him back again. The rhyme scheme here isn't precise, but it is reader-friendly, and invites participation: "'Sorry I'm late, Miss. I set off really early,/but on the way to school I was captured by a squid./I wriggled and I struggled till a turtle came and rescued me.'/'Oh no he didn't.' 'OH YES HE DID.'" The title here is a bit misleading as Tiddler doesn't tell his tales to mislead anyone deliberately, as in the original fable. Instead, he resembles Dr. Seuss's Marco from And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (Random, 1989), whose imagination is similarly bursting at the seams. The colorful, detailed illustrations feature an endearing cast of undersea denizens with the text woven through on clean white space. This would be an engaging book to share when stories have an underwater theme or when discussing how tales proliferate.— Grace Oliff, Ann Blanche Smith School, Hillsdale, NJ Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Title aside, this picture book is not an homage to Aesop so much as it is a salute to stories and how they travel. Tiddler, a little fish with “plain gray scales,” is given to flights of narrative fancy, and while most of his schoolmates do not believe Tiddler’s outrageous excuses for his tardiness, his friend Little Johnny Dory likes the tales so much that he tells them to his grandmother, who tells others. A misadventure with a fisherman’s net leaves Tiddler “lost in the middle of the ocean,” but the frightened fish hears a shoal of anchovies telling his story. The anchovies lead Tiddler to the shrimp who told them the story, the shrimp leads Tiddler to the whale who told her, and so on, until Tiddler follows his own story all the way home. The story has clear parallels to the film Finding Nemo but Donaldson avoids Disney cutesiness in her rhythmic text, and Scheffler creates winsome, expressive cartoon fish in appealing, bright coral-reef colors. Preschool-Kindergarten. --Janice Del Negro Praise for The Fish Who Cried Wolf "A charmingly illustrated story about a plain gray fish who 'blew small bubbles' but 'told tall tales..." Donaldson's gently paced cautionary tale is populated by Scheffler's comical undersea creatures... and the effect is always amusing." -- New York Times Book Review "Donaldson's rhyming text is crisp and clean, leaving plenty of metaphorical room for Scheffler's expansively imagined art. Always gifted at conjuring up entire worlds (even his spot illustrations feel animated and lovingly detailed), he creates an ocean effervescent with texture, color and vividly expressive personalities. And Tiddler is an excellent reader surrogate: spunky, wide-eyed and ultimately triumphant." -- Publishers Weekly "The colorful, detailed illustrations feature an endearing cast of undersea denizens with the text woven through on clean white space... An engaging book to share." -- School Library Journal Julia Donaldson served as the UK Children's Laureate from 2011 to 2013 and has written many bestselling and beloved children's books, including The Gruffalo , Room on the Broom , and Stick Man . She lives in West Sussex in the south of the UK. Axel Scheffler's award-winning books include Room on the Broom , The Snail and the Whale , and The Gruffalo . His illustrations have been published in more than 30 countries. He lives in London, England.