Book Review: Lazy Liza Lizard's Tricks

Title: Lazy Liza Lizard’s Tricks

Author: Marie Curtis Rains

Date: 1953

Publisher: Winston

ISBN: none

Length: 119 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Vera Neville

Quote: "‘Don’t be hanging’round here,’ said Mr. Snake. Liza got up. ‘You say Liza’s hanging around here, Mr. Snake? Is she on your bushes?’”

Before this book, Rains had written a book called Lazy Liza Lizard containing animal fables. (You know, the kind where the smarter animals, though described as adults, are characterized like ten-year-old children, and the animals whose mistakes are supposed to furnish a lesson are more like four-year-olds.) At the end of that book Liza had reformed and stopped playing tricks like stealing the other animals’ food right out of their cooking pots. Children wanted more stories about Liza’s tricks. Rains knew more stories of that kind, so, as the publisher explained, Lazy Liza Lizard’s Tricks was a prequel about some of the other things Liza had done before she reformed.

Sample: While arrogant Snake and complacent Frog are waiting for their six new potatoes to boil, Lizard takes the whole pot home and sets it over her fire. Frog sees a feather bolster hung out on a bush to air, drops it down the chimney, and steals the pot back as Lizard’s house fills with smoke. Strangely enough the pot now contains only four potatoes. Possibly, Frog observes, “that’s the way it should be.”

Who ever heard of a snake, a frog, or a lizard wanting to eat a potato? Liza is fairly hard to miss as a fictional stand-in for the child audience’s even younger siblings—a nuisance to whom the other animals have to be kind—in these stories. The stories themselves are part of the transition from oral-tradition folk tales to animated cartoons. Nobody behaves well enough to be a good role model for human children. Nobody gets badly hurt. The stories draw on earlier forms in European and African folklore, and have been transplanted to the Southern States in the 1910s or 1920s. The sunbonnets and mufflers and steam trains, in both drawings and narrative, are delightfully nostalgic.

Lazy Liza Lizard’s adventures never were on my top ten list of favorite books, as a child, but they were on my top hundred list. They’re not p.c. but they’re free from the cloying attempt to write different dialects that ruined some similar storybooks for baby-boomers. Adults who are interested in folklore, or children who want an easy, funny read with appealing pictures, might want to keep the stories of Liza Lizard alive.

But the price...would you look at those prices on Amazon? As public libraries rushed to discard their copies of these books, whether the books were badly worn or not, non-library-discards leaped into the collector price range. What I have is a library copy--by me, the wallpaper sample lovingly cut to shape to protect the cover adds nostalgia value, thank you very much--and discarded because of mold; I've cleaned it, but there will never be any guarantee that mold won't grow back in damp weather. In real life that copy won't cost $350, but good-as-new copies ordered online may cost that much, or more if prices keep rising.

Currently, to purchase these books here, you'll need to send $350 for Lazy Liza Lizard's Tricks, $200 for Lazy Liza Lizard, plus $5 for the package, to Boxholder at P.O. Box 322, or add $6 to the Paypal payment to the account you get by e-mailing salolianigodagewi at Yahoo. Both books will fit into one package, along with probably two more of similar size.