Mustafa is not all that eager to learn about his family’s work selling carpets in the Moroccan city where he lives. He’d much rather play. As his father tries to teach him a few phrases in the foreign languages that are important to their business, a bored Mustafa makes his escape, bedecked in a colorful rug that has been damaged and can’t be sold. He attracts the attention of other vendors in the marketplace, as well as a brightly feathered rooster. “Kho Kho Hou Houuuu!” calls Mustafa, the sounds for a rooster’s crow in Morocco. One by one, tourists from other countries join in, demonstrating the way a rooster crows in their languages—French, Spanish, Japanese, and English. They all follow Mustafa as he returns to his father’s shop, where he triumphantly announces, “I can crow in five languages!” (Ages 3–7)

A Moroccan boy named Mustafa discovers that one of the beautiful car pets in his father’s shop has a hole in it. He can have the carpet if he agrees to learn some foreign languages. Wearing the colorful carpet on his head, he runs off to the market, where he attracts the attention of a rooster. Tourists in the market marvel at carpet-clad Mustafa and his rooster and cite how roosters “cock-a-doodle-doo” in their own languages. Mustafa returns to his father’s shop with the tourists as customers and exclaims that he has learned to speak rooster in five languages. 2007 USBBY Outstanding International

Originally published as Le Magasin de Mon Père in French by L’Êcole des Loisirs France, in 2004.