ME AND YOU

Goldilocks hits the big city in this nuanced take on the old favorite. While the text echoes the traditional tale, Browne adds his own sly humor and presents strikingly different realms of experience in two intertwined, visually distinct narratives. In Baby Bear’s luminous world, a bad day is a bowl of too-hot cereal. The rather smug, sweater-wearing bear family in soft pastels on their porridge-cooling constitutional (“Daddy talked about his work. Mommy talked about her work. I just messed around”) contrasts starkly with Goldilocks’s sepia-toned world of fear and uncertainty that unfolds simultaneously, wordlessly, in sequential panels. Goldilocks, who gets separated from her mother in the sinister, graffiti-ridden city streets, takes refuge in the bear family’s yellow house (color appears when she moves into comfort) and plays out her infamous porridge-chair-bed–testing routine. When the interspecies worlds collide (and the angry-eyed bears go sepia), the girl flees, eventually running into her mother’s arms, both now awash in yellow. Clever, thought-provoking and unsettling. (Picture book. 5-8)