The Lion’s Deceit Review & Giveaway

Village Life Books is a new publishing press; they’ve recently published the book, The Lion’s Deceit, by Mpho Otukile. The books they publish are based on African stories and folktales.

The Lion’s Deceit is the story of a lazy lion who tries to find any way possible to get out of work. Life in the jungle is hard work, even for a strong lion who hunts for food. When the lion decides it’s too much work to hunt, he teams up with the fox to trick neighboring animals. Pretending to be sick, he fools the animals, one by one, as they each come to visit and check up on him. After all, they’ve heard that he’s so sick he won’t even go out of his cave.

One day the lion is caught in his deceit, though, after the jackal figures out just exactly what’s going on. When the animals confront the lion, what do you think will happen? Well, the rest of the story’ll have to wait until you read the book for yourself.

The Lion’s Deceit definitely kept my toddler’s attention. It’s a colorful picture book with easy to read words….it could be used as an easy reader with older children, as well. The story itself was slightly disturbing to me, as you know the lion is eating the animals….even though that’s the cycle of life and what has to happen for animals to survive. It didn’t seem to bother Jaden, though, and it’s not like it went into detail or anything, just implication. I honestly thought the story ended a bit too abruptly. But it’s probably in keeping with how the original story goes, and the author has done a wonderful job of bringing the story alive for young readers. The message in the story is also wonderful, as the consequences of deceit can be a very high price.

You can purchase The Lion’s Deceit for $10. You can purchase an autographed copy from Village Life Books or purchase from Createspace eStore, using coupon code 2LU4EXJM to get 10% off. I love that Village Life Books will donate part of the sale proceeds to Books for Africa, so that books can be shipped to Botswana. You can also find Village Life Books on Facebook.

The great news is that we’re giving away 2 copies of The Lion’s Deceit, one each to 2 MamaBuzz readers! You can enter to win by doing one or more of the following; just be sure to leave a separate comment for each way that you enter. I’ll draw the winner, via random.org, on Friday, August 19. This giveaway is open to U.S. and Canada. Good luck, and have a wonderful day!

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(Disclosure: I received a copy of this book, free of charge, from Village Life Books, for the purposes of this review. All views/opinions remain solely my own.)

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