The Goblin and the Girl

The simplest of stories, but text and illustration match perfectly to produce a gentle and charming creation. There is a girl. We don’t know her name, but it doesn’t matter. Each time this girl looks in the mirror, she sees a goblin. So decided is her fixation that she won’t play with other children and always wears a large hat to school so no one can see her face. When the hat blows away one day, she runs into the forest and is lost. There is a happy ending and she learns that she is ‘a bright and beautiful girl’ when she at last sees herself as someone else sees her. The little girl’s loneliness is palpable in the delicate illustrations. We see it in her isolation in school, in the bleakness of the trees in the wood and the rain that comes down in stair rods. The fact that she has a ‘knight’ in the form of a young boy walking his dog, who rescues her from herself, is completely in keeping with the theme. An utterly lovely book.