Rote memorization, once a time-honoured teaching tool, has really gone out of style. Days when kids could recite “The Cremation of Sam McGee” are gone forever, so much so that many children now fail to see the value of memorizing anything. Which is fine until multiplication is introduced and they discover that you can’t get very far in arithmetic without committing the times tables to memory. What do you do with a child who simply refuses to memorize the times tables? Or one who suffers from a learning disability and can’t? This question prompted Brigitte Kortright, a special education teacher, to produce Fables of the Times Tables. This book makes characters out of numbers, and presents the times tables in the form of stories. For example, seven is depicted as a hunter, and the entire seven times table is a shooting match.

Dennis Nobel’s line drawings are the kind of rudimentary art one sometimes sees in author-illustrated manuscripts. Given the current sophisticated standard of children’s illustrations, this isn’t acceptable. But Kortright’s text contains some clever mnemonic devices. For example, an equation featuring a number times itself shows the character looking into a mirror, imagining a character that is the answer; four looks at herself in the mirror, wishing she looked like Sweet Sixteen. Rhymes are used liberally, as in “3 x 8 = 24, a very happy birthday roar.” But editing could have removed some failed metaphors and awkward phrasing from the writing.

At 155 pages, Fables of the Times Tables is a lot of reading for someone with a learning disability, and is probably intended more as a resource for teachers with that audience. This book may be useful with avid readers who are averse to numbers. These narratives will stick in the memory, but the times tables themselves still require some rote memorization. For some kids, however, this book may be the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down, even if it is an acquired taste.