Yours Truly, Goldilocks by Alma Flor Ada, Leslie Tryon (Illustrator)

From the Publisher

Everyone's been invited to the Three Little Pigs' housewarming party. Goldilocks and Little Red Riding Hood have already marked it on their calendars.

Unfortunately, so have the Wolves -- the Big Bad kind who forced the Pigs to build their house of bricks in the first place! As the Pigs' friends write one another about the party, and the Wolves correspond about their plans for revenge, their letters give picture book readers a fresh, funny take on some familiar characters.

Publishers Weekly

In this sly picture book, Ada and Tryon make a return visit to the storybook backdrop of their Dear Peter Rabbit. While the sequel succeeds as a stand-alone, it offers double the fun in tandem with its predecessor. The exchange of letters among familiar charactersGoldilocks, the Three Little Pigs, Peter Rabbit, Little Red Riding Hood, Baby Bear and, of course, the Big Bad Wolf (aka Fer O'Cious)continues as the pigs invite their pals to their new, wolf-proof home for a housewarming party. The wolf, however, has been spying on the pigs, and he hatches a plan of his own, suggesting that his cousin join him in an ambush. But the wolves haven't counted on Baby Bear's mother and her swift reflexes. The mixing and matching of nursery favorites provides a lively framework for the epistolary conceit and allows even the youngest readers access to the inside track. Amusing details, meanwhile, hook older readers (Goldilocks, for instance, is imagined as Mr. McGregor's daughter, and resides on Veggie Lane). Tryon enriches her delicate pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrations with an abundance of delicious visual tidbits, as in the cover art, which shows the wolf on a stakeout, peering through a telescope at his prey. The ending hints of more adventures to comegood news indeed. Ages 4-8. (May)

Children's Literature

At a time when cell phones and email have largely replaced the care and beauty given to handwritten letters, there is value in reviving the notion of true correspondence. Children could spin off their own letters to storybook characters after reading Yours Truly, Goldilocks. Alma Flor Ada has written a series of letters among The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks, Little Red Riding Hood and Peter Rabbit, with two wolves exchanging additional letters-all about a big housewarming party for the pigs. However, some younger children might find it confusing to have all these familiar characters appear in the same story, and many more will have difficulty with the vocabulary in the wolves' letters-"surveillance," "porcine," "sorrowful"-more than can be comfortably learned and absorbed from a single book. The illustrations are colorful and carefully detailed, right to the family portrait in the rabbit hutch.

School Library Journal

K-Gr 3--Like Dear Peter Rabbit (Atheneum, 1994), this charming book tells its story through an exchange of letters. Here Ada chronicles the attempt of the three little pigs to plan a housewarming party. Meanwhile the villains from the previous title are still up to no good, spying on the residents of the forest and planning an attack on the homeward-bound guests. Fortunately, the surprise is on them and the two wolves lose both their pride and their fur. This is fairy-tale fun at its best. Following these well-loved characters on a new adventure tickles the imagination with fanciful "what ifs." Tryon's wonderfully intricate colored drawings, with their delightful details and carefully wrought scenarios, bring the action to life. Perspective plays an important role in many of the pictures, from the wolf's telescope-lens view of his victims, to an interior scene of Peter Rabbit's den. Warm colors and sharp details pull readers right into the Hidden Forest. The climactic scenes are on wordless double-page spreads that perfectly convey a sense of frivolity and fear, while the final letter leaves readers hoping for yet another installment. Get on the mailing list for these letters.--Beth Tegart, Oneida City Schools, NY

Product Details

• ISBN: 0689844522
  
• ISBN-13: 9780689844522
• Format: Paperback, 40pp
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
• Pub. Date: August 2001
• Edition Description: Reprint
• Sales Rank: 292,589
• Age Range: 12 and up