Mother Goose in Prose

If ever a writer and an artist were an unbeatable team, it’s on these pages. Put that team to work on the most famous characters in the English language and the result can be nothing less than classic. Here two giant imaginations take on Little Boy Blue, The Cat and the Fiddle, Old King Cole, Mistress Mary, Jack Horner, The Man in the Moon, Hickory, Dickory, Dock, Bo-Peep, Tommy Tucker, Humpty Dumpty, The Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, Miss Muffet and others. To create Mother Goose in Prose, the man who gave us The Wonderful Wizard of Oz started with the bare bones of the celebrated nursery rhymes and embroidered them as only a master storyteller could. Now Mary Quite Contrary lives in a real house, has a mother and is visited in her garden by a Squire. Humpty Dumpty is far from just a five line verse here and, once read, his will never be just a five line story again. Did you ever wonder how the old woman’s house got to resemble a shoe? In case the reader doesn’t get the picture, Baum departs from his storytelling to draw it himself. This is a charming book, with a warm introduction by Baum, who takes care to trace the vague but fascinating history of the rhymes back to 1650, through the three countries that claim Mother Goose for their own. But “the songs that cluster around her name are what we love,” he reminds us. “Many of these nursery rhymes,” Baum says, “are complete tales in themselves.