On the first page of every fable there is one word, printed in gold, next to the animal. Aggression. Boastfulness. Impatience.
It is the smallest decision in the book and I would defend it above almost anything else in there.
Why the word goes first
The usual way to write a moral story is to tell the story and reveal the lesson at the end, like a conjuror. I did the opposite. The fault is named before anything happens.
I did it because I was not writing a mystery. A four-year-old is not going to be robbed of anything by knowing that this one is about impatience. What they gain is a word attached to a picture at the moment they are most likely to remember both.
A child who has the word can use the word
This is the whole argument and it took me an embarrassingly long time to arrive at it.
Before a child has the word, a difficult feeling is weather. It arrives, it does things to them, it leaves. They cannot discuss it because they cannot point at it.
After a child has the word, the feeling is a thing with a name. Impatience. And a thing with a name can be talked about at the table, complained about, blamed on a brother, and eventually noticed in themselves. That last step takes years, and it cannot start at all without the word.
Why gold
Practical, mostly. Gold is the only colour on the page that is not part of the painting, so the eye goes to it and a child asks what it says. Which is exactly the question you want.
There is also a slightly sentimental reason. In the village where I grew up, Moșteni, in Teleorman county in southern Romania, the only gold anyone saw was on the icons in the church, and it meant "this part matters". I did not plan that connection. I noticed it afterwards and decided to keep it.
What parents tell me happens
The pattern is always the same and it always takes about a fortnight.
First week: the child says the word back to you when you read it. Second week: the child says the word about somebody else, usually a sibling, usually loudly, usually in front of a guest. Somewhere in the third or fourth week, if you are lucky and you say nothing at all: the child says it about themselves.
That third one is the entire point of twenty-six fables, and there is no way to hurry it. You can only lay the words out and wait.
The virtue on the card
The book names the fault. The card deck names the virtue that answers it, on the same card, next to the same animal.
That pairing was deliberate too. A book of twenty-six faults with no answers would be a fairly bleak object to hand a five-year-old. Fault on one side, way out on the other, and the child gets to see both at once.
Where to find them
Twenty-six gold words, one per letter, in the storybook that comes with the full set at $49.95 during the launch.
You can also see the animals for nothing: the twenty-six colouring posters are free, one for every letter, and printing a few is the cheapest way to find out whether your child takes to them.