Rumpelstiltskin

Rumpelstiltskin – Tom Tit Tot in its English telling – is the well-known tale of a young girl who is in an impossible situation.  Tasked (because of her boastful father) with spinning straw into gold, failure would mean her death.  Her predicament is solved by the appearance of a ‘little man,’ who completes the task for her, each night extracting a price, culminating in the girl promising her first child if she becomes queen. It is a well-known story, with the ending coming as the girl guesses the imp’s name.

Barnett does not shy away from the difficulties of the story: the murderous king who marries the girl; the girl willing to risk her baby, and who or what is the stranger who claims the fees for his help, yet is willing to heighten the tension by adding a final challenge: guess his name and the child goes free. Rumpelstiltskin is a familiar and uncomfortable story where menace and power are defeated by chance.

Mac Barnett as author makes small but judicious changes to the source material, but requires his readers to sit with the discomfort of a story of greed and threats of violence. The artwork from Carson Ellis draws on a tradition of primitive folk art which serves to underline the roots of the story. The second night of the girl’s trial is represented by the king on the left hand page exultant yet still threatening the girl ‘Or else, off with your head.’ The right hand page is a full-page image of a huge, high hall dominated by a pile of straw, with the girl looking at it, the spinning wheel in the foreground. All the movement, all the energy is in the greedy kind crying ‘Stupendous! Superb!’ The girl is motionless, her face hidden in her long hair.

Barnett allows the girl (who does become queen; we do not hear about her relationship with the king!) more agency as she presents the choices of name for the little man, and there is real humour in the choice of names: “Argyle; Sharif; Lenny…Mac (yes, it’s worth noting); Catsmeat; Rumsfeld?” Carson Ellis has her growing in power, staring at us dressed in rich clothes with fruit on the table, just one picture just before she defeats the little man as dawn breaks.

Barnett introduces a twist at the end as the growing baby and his mother catch frogs in the pond, and Ellis places them back in the countryside. Lots of questions here, lots of ponder.

As an adult consumer of picturebooks, I would want to give the tight, well-composed storytelling and thoughtful artwork together way more than five stars; reviewing this as a book for young readers, however, this perhaps has a limited appreciation,  its solemn tone of illustration and the somewhat uncritical presentation of a difficult folk tale mean that it would need careful thought for its first reading – but this is a book that deserves just that kind of close attention.