For millennia, Somalia has been crossed and recrossed by camel caravans of merchants, bringing with them stories such as "The Good Prince," in which a kindhearted prince conquers the evil magic of a beautiful sorceress, and "The Ogress and the Snake," a Somali Hansel and Gretel story about five little girls, abandoned in the desert, who take refuge in the house of a man-eating ogress. Elizabeth Laird heard many of these tales in Jigjiga, the capital of Ethiopia's Somali region. She gathers together the finest of them in The Ogress and the Snake and Other Stories from Somalia. The stories abound with colorful characters — Deya Ali, the greedy trickster fox; Kabaalaf the shopkeeper, crooked as a jug-handle, who meets his match in the slippery Hirsi; and the miraculous (and bodyless) Head, whose magic powers conjure up a talking camel and bring him a princess.
