The Little Red Fort

A girl decides to build a fort and tries to recruit her brothers to help, but to no avail. Instead, she builds the fort herself. After the fort is built, the brothers are suddenly motivated to add some improvements to the fort and the girl includes them in an in-fort evening with cookies.

This little story is a contemporary version of the old folktale, The Little Red Hen, with a contemporary strong-girl main character along with a revised (and more satisfying) ending which includes the less-than-hardworking brothers in the fort activities after the boys finally help out. The characters are wonderfully diverse and the book includes plans for a fort-of-one's-own for the reader to construct.