Coyote's new suit

King, Thomas. Coyote's new suit. Illus. Johnny Wales. Toronto: Key Porter Kids, 2004.

When Coyote boasts about his beautiful suit, Raven can't resist teasing him and using Coyote's vanity to wreak havoc in the forest. Soon Coyote's quest for the ultimate suit leaves many of his fellow creatures without fur and forces them to the edge of town where humans hang out their discarded clothes on lines just waiting (or so Raven promises) for someone to come claim them. Chaos breaks out when Coyote has a yard sale and the humans, who are busy trying on his collection of animal suits to replace their missing clothes, meet up with a bizarrely dressed crew of forest animals. Watercolour (and pencil?) illustrations play up the humour of the situation, especially the clothing swaps. Thomas King draws on various First Nations characters and storytelling traditions to create this story: The narrative is strong, conversational, funny, irreverent and full of trickster humour; Coyote and Raven, both tricksters, are the primary players in the story; and the long-ago past ("when animals and human beings still talked to each other") blends seamlessly with the present (baseball games, supermarkets, bingo, gold-foil pedal pushers). A playful fun story in which one trickster is out-witted by another and, as the ending suggests, doesn't ever really seem to learn his lesson.