Terrapin's Travels

By Ryan Peter Anderson

Terrapin's Travels is a modern folktale that finally explains the origins of those dancing, music-making turtles, that Phil our hearts with love and follow us everyWeir, while exploring the beginnings of those dancing bears, skeletons with roses for hair, and strutting crows while answering the age-old question about where Harry Hood goes. Like Garcia and Grisman's pickin' and playin', this children's chapter book is not just for kids. Parents, music lovers, and literature lovers alike will find enjoyment in its phrasing and enlightenment in its pages. So give this as a gift to a young independent reader, or read it to a grateful child well before they can read it themselves and experience the ride together. Embedded throughout this adventurous folktale for families and grateful kids are all the important behaviors, attitudes and actions that the highly conscious value like simplicity, self-reliance, self-discovery, selflessness, sustainability, charity, music, dancing, life, love, bravery, accepting blame, admitting fault, forgiveness, adventure and travel. These morals are celebrated through the successes of certain characters. Character flaws and civic practices that the enlightened wish did not exist, but are all too ubiquitous, are also examined. These immoralities, like bullying, self-centeredness, exploitation of the Earth, war, and ignorance are also examined. Characters that partake in any of these ill-willed occupations are poetically punished in one way or another. And often times get shown the light. These valuable lessons are made accessible to children by enabling anthropomorphized animals, like a male Sea Turtle who ignores his impulses to mindlessly go out into the sea and instead heads West to see what he can find, carry out the action, weather the drama, fall in love, end the Everwar, and save the Tortoise Queen. Allusions to the classics abound, like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and the German legend Faust. More recent works are also referenced, like Robert Hunter's song lyrics written for The Grateful Dead and Tom Marshal's lyrics written for Phish, all in an effort to create a story that is both timeless and contemporary. Rhyming, repetition, and alliteration are used frequently and freely to create a rhythm that at times evokes voices from the past- like Whitman, Ginsburg and Kerouac and at times takes on a whole new tone all its own. A real feel of Americana is created by including descriptions of steam locomotives, steam ships, wagons, string ragtime bands, traveling circuses, buck dancers, picnics, farms, barns, cemeteries, and celebrations of life. This tale takes place in colorful locals- such as the Green Mountains of Vermont, Colonial New England, Appalachia, the American coastlines, the color-rich Southwest, the large scale of the Pacific Northwest, underwater reefs, shipwrecks, and a unique take on the sunken city of Atlantis. This modern moral epic tale is comprised of three parts and those parts are divided up into smaller chapters still, making Terrapin's Travels accessible to the youngest of independent readers in the hope of enabling the next stewards to become a friendly, free-thinking, fun loving, music making, eco-conscious generation. Or read it to your young ones and enjoy all this timeless tale has to offer as a family.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1475124163
• ISBN13: 9781475124163
• Release Date: April 2018
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 106 Pages
• Weight: 0.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.3" x 5.5"