Front Porch Tales & North Country Whoppers is a wonderful book.

We have been studying the regions of the United States. With any study we do, there is a heavy reliance on books. I try to find as many books on the topic we are studying as possible, this includes fiction and non-fiction.

In studying the New England states, one of the books I found was Front Porch Tales & North Country Whoppers by Tomie DePaola. I love how the stories paint a picture of the region. They are reminiscent of tall tales in the way they are related. The book is filled with short tales that were fun to read between novels. It also included shorter comic strip like anecdotes set up in panels. The stories are worded in a way that they can be read using the dialect of the area. Our favorite way to experience these stories though was to listen to the audio book along with the text. Listening to Tomie DePaola read let us experience how he meant the text to sound.

We all enjoyed the stories and it gave way to some interesting discussions on the happenings and characters in the tales. It leant itself as a great writing prompt as well. We challenged ourselves to write similar stories from our town. Perhaps we’ll have to publish a book of our own!