The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine – Reviewed by Ginger Littleton

Mark Twain often told his daughters bedtime stories. He outlined one of them on 16 pages of handwritten notes. The notes, discovered in 2011 among Twain’s papers at the University of California in Berkeley, provided an opportunity to flesh 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. Grandfather, who is nothing but mean, chews the seeds and fortuitously dies. One seed remains and Johnny tends it until it produces a single flower 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 bombastic king whose son, Prince Oleomargarine, is missing. The forest creatures know where the son is and we meet Prince Oleomargarine, who just as pompous and bombastic 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 anything

at all.” Or “There are more chickens than a man can know in this world, but an unprovoked 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 therein Johnny’s land, “All the money you can ever find will not afford 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, filled with gems of wisdom as pertinent 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 away

thinking, “I am still glad to know you,” Mr. Twain.