Reviewed by: Fearsome Giant, Fearless Child: A Worldwide Jack and the Beanstalk Story by Paul Fleischman Deborah Stevenson Fleischman, Paul, ad. Fearsome Giant, Fearless Child: A Worldwide Jack and the Beanstalk Story; illus. by Julie Paschkis. Godwin/Holt, 2019 [40p] (World-wide Series) ISBN 978-1-250-15177-3 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 2-4 In this successor to Glass Slipper, Gold Sandal (BCCB 11/07), Fleischman and Paschkis turn their lens to the tale of, as the back cover puts it, "child vs. giant." As he did in the "Cinderella" retelling, Fleischman deftly splices together a story from global variants of the "Jack in the Beanstalk"/"Tom Thumb" tale, drawing on tales from Denmark and Russia, Ethiopia and the U.S., Mongolia and Chile, and multiple other countries. Though the general bones of the tale will be familiar to most listeners, they'll be intrigued to see the variants: on one page the stolen item is a pillow, on another, it's a horse, on still another, it's a harp; in one paragraph the villain is an ogre, in another a witch. The narrative shifts from one country's contribution to another's with a clear visual differentiation, drawing attention to the transitions but keeping the bridges smooth and the momentum constant. The result is like an elegant round-robin story, and it cunningly uses echoes of plot beats as poetic repetition ("How he was the youngest of twelve. The youngest of thirteen. How the woman with seven brawny sons gave birth to an eighth who was no bigger than a finger"). In Paschkis' gouache art, each page sets a smaller full-color scene against a monochromatic or two-color background of intricate, narratively relevant design; the frame of the illustrations featuring the brothers laying down to sleep in the Gambian tale, for instance, includes the crocodile from that tale that never appears in this book's text, and its red-lined horizontal beds connect with the green-lined beds in the French scene opposite. This is packed with curricular possibilities for language arts (though kids may find the project harder to replicate than it seems) and cultural studies as well as offering an interesting opportunity for readers theater performance, and audiences will enjoy the opportunity to play compare and contrast with other tales they know. There are no specific source notes, but the author directs readers to two collections for more information. DS Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois