Ten-Word Tiny Tales: To Inspire and Unsettle

Twisty, playful fun.

An afterword encourages readers to illustrate and expand a tiny tale, offering additional prompts and questions to help would-be writers tap into their creativity. . . this will engage sophisticated readers and be welcomed by creative writing classes.

Laughter, puzzlement, shivers--10-word morsels from U.K. children's laureate Coelho, each illustrated by contemporary artists including Raissa Figueroa, Júlia Sardà, and Shaun Tan, evoke a startling panoply of thoughts and feelings. In a collaborate work that recalls The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, some brief stories make dark jokes or suggest grim outcomes ("The Venus flytrap keeps edging closer/ to Grandma's favorite chair"), while others deliver shots of straight horror ("The thing that slumps/ from the egg has my eyes") or hint at adventure ("The bear turns the ignition/ on the snowmobile./ It works!"). Various artist contributors take different tacks in visualizing the lines, many developing the concepts. Alongside "My splintered oars are lost/ as my boat speeds onward," Alex T. Smith imagines three brown-skinned human figures in a pink-hued galaxy, pursued by a shark-shaped steampunk battleship threatening to swallow them all. Thea Lu, meanwhile, adds a sinister seasonality to the pale-skinned figure attending "the X-rays reveal/ writing etched onto/ all of my bones." Front and back matter detail the book's beginnings and suggest using the tales as writing prompts, inviting readers to expand, create, and let their pens and imaginations soar. Ages 7-10. (Sept.)

Copyright 2023 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission.

A global roster of 21 distinguished illustrators contributes imagery for Coelho's cryptic 10-word stories. Invoking multiple dimensions in his notes to readers and the tales themselves, Coelho invites illustrators to consider interplanetary space, undersea caverns, and realms between. . . . Twisty, playful fun.
—Kirkus Reviews

Each tale is thought-provoking and guaranteed to elicit questions and debate. An afterword encourages readers to illustrate and expand a tiny tale, offering additional prompts and questions to help would-be writers tap into their creativity. . . this will engage sophisticated readers and be welcomed by creative writing classes.
—Booklist 

In an exercise destined to end up in language arts classes, author Coelho teams up with twenty-one artists to create ten-word short stories. . . . There's really not a dud in the bunch; from humorous to scary to melancholy, there's something here for everyone, meaning readers of all sorts can follow Coelho's writing tips in the front and backmatter to create and expand upon their own tiny tales.
—The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

Mr. Coelho's sentences have an eerie quality that is likely to please children ages 7-10, though most of the artwork steers clear of anything downright ominous. The exception, and by far the book's most striking piece of artwork, is a painting by Shaun Tan himself, made to accompany the line: 'Every year they honored their son by decorating his skull.' . . . It is an arresting scene—and, as Mr. Coelho will have hoped, almost impossible to regard without wanting to make up a story of one's own.
—The Wall Street Journal

One of my favorites of 2023! Poet Laureate Coelho created a bunch of spine-tingling stories using just words and I am so here for it. . . . Working with educators, however, leads me to my favorite parts about this book: it will inspire young creators to imagine their own stories, illustrate one of the tiny tales in their own style, or take a tiny tale and grow it.
—Lorie Barber, Anderson's Bookshop