Remember all that fuss about consent and the kiss sleeping beauty receives from her prince? But perhaps that kind of overthinking is in fact just the opposite – a literal-minded sort of under-thinking. It’s definitely possible to overthink children’s literature. (Intriguingly, the story is rooted in a 19th-century fairy tale in which it’s an old woman who has no boundaries, strolling into a wood cabin that’s home to three bachelor bears…) The whole daddy-mummy-baby refrain suddenly felt stultifyingly conformist to this single mother by choice***. Soon, even the bears’ domestic set-up began to rankle with me. Maybe some of the less subtle illustrators had it right, and Goldilocks really is just another entitled brat. Unfortunately, Goldilocks herself resembles a contestant in one of those creepy child beauty pageants.Īll this ‘Goldilocks-ing’ (yes, it’s become a verb apparently**) got me thinking more closely about the text, and the more I thought, the more problematic it became. Gennady Spirin’s retelling apparently follows faithfully the story we all remember, and the pictures are gloriously detailed (lots of kids’ illustrations tend to be crisp and uncluttered, but in my experience, small children delight in unpicking busy pages). It’s tirelessly snarky in the perkiest way possible – a uniquely exhausting combination, especially for parents already running low on sleep. Enough of this tweeness already!Īnother one-man band, James Marshall, has produced a retelling in which the heroine is a harridan. Writer-illustrator Ruth Sanderson’s Goldilocks looked charming but turns out to have a new, happy ending, that allows the protagonist to atone for her breaking-and-entering ways with, of all things, a recipe for blueberry muffins. Dip into some of the online reviews, and you’ll find grumbles about inconsistencies galore, right down to which bowl/chair/bed is the right size for our pint-sized tea leaf. And anyway, text-wise, Goldilocks was Goldilocks, right?
Particular though I am about words, I also used to be an art critic and some predilections die hard. Initially, I prioritised the illustrations. Its very size also suggested that perfection was possible, and I was soon feeling picky as the story’s protagonist.
But even having weeded out the spoofs and foreign language editions, the choice was confounding. It’s all been putting me in mind of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, a book that I once adored with an intensity that drove my mum nuts and presumably left the book itself in tatters, since it’s nowhere to be found among the stacks that she’s kept from mine and my sister’s childhood.Ĭuriously, none of my local bookshops had a copy so I headed online to find a boggling array of Goldilocks. Between, for instance, her perfectly proportioned babyccino and my gargantuan vat of sugary warm milk (it’s a decaf latte, okay, and if I sound a little defensive that’s because yes, I am too embarrassed to meet the barista’s eye when I order it). My daughter currently loves pointing out the differences between what’s hers and what’s mama’s*.
0 kommentar(er)
