The King and the Seed
In this imaginatively retold story from a traditional Chinese Mandarin fairy tale, King Karnak is old and childless and worried about an heir. He sends out a proclamation inviting anyone who would like to be king to enter a competition. All the knights and nobles come to the castle and prepare themselves for a war-like tournament. Among the crowd is Jack, a farmer’s son. He’s not interested in fighting, he just enjoys the excitement.
But the competition isn’t a tournament. Instead, the king gives everyone a seed and asks him to return in a year with what he’s grown and then he’ll decide on the winner. Jack tries everything: compost, manure, sun, water, shade – but nothing works. When the year is up he returns sadly to the castle. Everyone else has wonderful flowers to show. Jack has to tell the king that, although he’s tried everything, nothing has grown.
But the king has a secret. He boiled the seeds so that they wouldn’t grow. All the other competitors have cheated and Jack is the only person to tell the truth. The king is looking for somebody with the courage and honesty to tell the truth to succeed him, and he chooses Jack.
This comes under the umbrella of ‘historical’ in that it originates in an ancient tale and Eric Maddern sets it in an all-purpose long ago, vaguely medieval setting. And why not? Such things are expected of fairy tales which travel across countries and time. It is a simple story, engagingly told and splendidly illustrated by Paul Hess.
I thought that William, age five, would enjoy it. I assumed that fairy tales had a timeless appeal and I thought that he would like the pictures. Interestingly, I was wrong on both counts.
—Elizabeth Hawksley
This isn’t my favourite book. I do like stories, but this one was very sad. I also really like flowers, but this flower never grew. I thought that Jack was tricked into being made King, and he didn’t want to be King. Nobody in the story was very happy and I didn’t understand why they wrote it into a story at all as nothing really happened. The pictures were colourful, but everyone looked a bit frightening like a bad dream; their heads were too big, no one smiled very much and when they did smile, they still looked all sad in the rest of their bodies. Mummy thought that this was the sort of book I ought to like, but it was a bit sad and dreamy for me.
—William Stockton, age 5
