Page 21 - Panama City Living Magazine

THE PURLOINING OF PRINCE OLEOMARGARINEGinger Littleton currently serves as the chair of the Bay District School Board and is Director of the FSU Panama City STEM Institute. She worked as a high school English teacher, many of those years in Bay District Schools, and sees it as the biggest role in her career. Ginger is continually interested in ways to engage learners and to pique their curiosity about the world around them. She has three daughters who have professional careers and who have provided her with a large family, all of whom love to read and learn.Mark Twain often told his daugh- ters bedtime stories. In 1879, he outlined one of them on 16 pages of handwritten notes. The notes, discovered in 2011 among Twain’s papers at the University of Cal- ifornia in Berkeley, provided an opportunity to esh out a Twain story more than a hundred years later, a task that fell to the husband and wife team of Erin and Philip Stead, becoming “The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine” (2017). And what a fairy tale ensues!A destitute young boy named Johnny and his chicken named Pestilence and Famine meet a plain but beautiful fairy who gives him a handful of magical seeds. Grandfa- ther, who is nothing but mean, chews the seeds and fortuitously dies. One seed re- mains and Johnny tends it until it produces a single ower which he eats and gains the ability to talk to animals.Johnny realizes he is rich, not in money but in the forest creatures who befriend him. Johnny then met the pompous and bom- bastic king whose son, Prince Oleomarga- rine, is missing. The forest creatures know where the son is and we meet Prince Oleo- margarine, who just as pompous and bom- bastic as his father.Twain’s wisdom, undimmed by time, shines through with such zingers as, “There are men who cannot hear animals, and then there are men who cannot hear anythingPHOTOGRAPHY BY BONNIE BRANTat all.” Or “There are more chickens than a man can know in this world, but an unpro- voked kindness is the rarest of birds.”The story distinguishes often between here and there, here being a place where a young boy of Johnny’s age can collect piles and piles of money and, with that money “He can buy all the things he will ever need.” But there in Johnny’s land, “All the money you can ever nd will not a ord you even one of the most important things around, which is a true friend.”This is a children’s book, beautifully written and skillfully illustrated. This is a grownups book, lled with gems of wisdom as per- tinent today as they were in Twain’s day. Anyone reading this book and reengaging with Twain through the imagination and translation of the Steads will come awaythinking, “I am still glad to know you,” Mr. Twain.Reviewed by Ginger LittletonBOOK REVIEWwww.PanamaCityLiving.com • March - April 2018 • 21