Taking well-known stories and standing them on their heads is a concept that is a lot of fun to play with, and that’s what Miller and Slavin have done here, taking a bite out of Goldilocks.
“There once was a bear
with a shaggedy head
who came into my cabin
and hopped on my bed.
He wasn’t too big
and he wasn’t too small
and I really don’t know
why he came in at all.”
So says our young narrator, and that’s where the fun begins. She starts going through a list of all the things the bear might have done instead, each section ending with a new thing that he actually did do in her cabin: snoozing on the bed, jumping on the bed, dancing on the bed, swinging from the rafters, and several other things I won’t mention here.
The rhyme is contagious and the illustrations are wonderfully comical. The book should be good fun to share with an early reader.