Gold
By: Jed Alexander
Publisher: Creston Books, USA, 2022
Format: Hardcover
Pure gold
First, a confession: As someone who has spent years of my career being a professional storyteller, I have a great love for almost all the traditional fairytales. However, Goldlocks is an exception. To me, it's just too much of a cautionary tale ("Don't mess with other peoples property! Don't go where you don't belong!") lacking both the happy ending, humor and hope that usually characterizes fairy tales. I loved Jed Alexander's playful, wordless interpretation of Little Red Riding Hood in his book Red, but must admit I doubted his choice of fairy tale for book nr. 2. I was wrong. In Jed Alexander's reimagining of the story, Goldilocks is no longer a trespasser, and it's no longer a tale about about protecting one's property - it's tale about sharing and belonging.
At the start of the book we see a family of three bears leaving their house to go on a bike ride. Right after they leave, a yellow bus pulls up, and a small girl gets off. The next spread shows us that we are in a big city: The girl walks along a street of Victorian-style houses with a cityscape in the background. While the scenery is realistic, it is obvious that we are in a fairy tale world: We can see the trunk of an elephant watering his flowers in one of the houses, and behind the girl we see a car driven by billy goats and a pig. The girl enters a house, and we see her making supper and setting the table. When the bear family returns to the house, they are greeted by both the mess the girl has made, and the delicious scents from the kitchen. The girl has fallen asleep on the sofa, and in a dramatic full spread we see the shadows of the bears hovering over her. At this this point, we do assume that the bears are friendly, but knowing the fairytale will make us a little nervous - what will happen next?
Flowers. That is what is next, the cute little bear cub offers the girl yellow flowers. The family- and from this point on it is very clear that this is a family - share a wonderful meal, do the dishes together and all fall asleep on the sofa.
Alexander is an amazing visual storyteller. As in Red, he uses a very restricted color scheme: Black line drawings complimented by one single color, in this book a beautiful, golden yellow. The yellow color helps the reader follow the story and accents things like scarves, the bus, and the house, but not - as one might expect - the girl's hair: Our protagonist is a black girl with black hair. Alexander makes maximum use of the long, narrow format of the book, creating both gorgeous full spreads and pages where we see actions evolve like in a storyboard for a movie. Both the bears and the girl are portrayed with so much warmth, humor and detail it is impossible not to fall in love with them.
I have had the pleasure of reading this book with many families and groups of children over the last years. It is always joyful, and we end up spending a lot of time studying the illustrations. But there is one picture that always takes the longest to read, because it makes both children and adult want to linger on the page, and that is the picture below of the family sleeping on the sofa. It is such a perfect illustration of what it means to be a family, of belonging and of feeling totally safe. In the upper right corner of this picture there is a family portrait, which shows that the bears and the girl have the same color, even though they are different species: There are so many ways we can belong in this world.
For a silent retelling of a fairy tale to be successful it needs to, in my opinion, offer a meningful reading also to those who do not know the original story. Gold clearly checks this box. Of course, having knowledge of Goldilocks will be extra rewarding, because you will have extra elements of both recognition and surprise, an intertextual reference always adds value to a reading. But Gold is a beautiful story also in it's own right: It challenges not only our expectations from the fairy tale, but our assumptions on who can belong together.
Jed Alexander has published four wonderful wordless books so far: Red, Gold, Olive and (Mostly) Wordless. Let's keep our finger crossed that he keeps going, because this is pure gold.
