A Doubly Clever Folktale

Written and illustrated by Demi, picture book One Grain of Rice: A Mathematical Folktale is the author’s retelling of the Indian folktale “Sissa and the Troublesome Trifles.”  Published in 1997 by Scholastic Press, this book for children ages 4-8 tells the story of an Indian raja who thought he was wise and fair by requiring those in his kingdom to give him most of their rice crop for safekeeping in the event of a famine.  Well, when famine comes, he turns out to be not so fair after all, keeping all of the rice for himself until a clever girl Rani asks him, as a reward for a good deed she performed, for one grain of rice doubled for thirty days. Demi’s vibrantly colored and beautifully detailed illustrations show us just how much rice this amounts to for Rani and the hungry people she shares it with: over one billion grains of rice.  An eye-catching gateway fold reveals that on the thirtieth day, the royal storehouses have been emptied on the backs of 256 elephants. The rich gold accents and engaging story will draw readers in for a read-aloud, but this text also makes an excellent curriculum support, a 30-day table on the book’s last page providing the numbers of grains of rice given to Rani on each day and an instruction to add these numbers together to get the grand total of 1,073,741,823 grains of rice.  Readers of all ages will delight in this engaging tale of how one clever girl used math to feed the hungry and teach a ruler a lesson about compassion and fairness.