Liars and Saints

 I took my daughter to the library, just to return a book, but she wanted to go in. Then, inevitably, she wanted to hold and rearrange each item in a collection of approximately fifty Berenstain Bears sagas. And something else tumbled out. Steven Kellogg is now known for "Pecos Bill," "Johnny Appleseed," "Jack and the Beanstalk"--beautiful, lavish retellings of classic tales. But I hadn't known, early in his career, he had an interest in mystery stories. "The Mystery of the Missing Red Mitten" concerns a little girl, Annie, who may or may not be a victim of theft. Where is that mitten? She has lost five this winter.  Here is the challenging thing about a mystery. It needs to reconstruct the past--but, at the same time, there needs to be forward momentum. Alliances need to shift, and shift again,  in the present.  If it's just a story of one interrogation after another, after another, the plot becomes tedious. The joke of Kellogg's boo...

 Today, I'm looking at images from Steven Kellogg's adaptation of "Jack and the Beanstalk." Kellogg is among the country's most-honored artists; his tall tales ("Johnny Appleseed," "Paul Bunyan") are especially beloved. I like the illustrations in the tall tales, but the tales themselves feel episodic; they don't have characters I love. Maybe it's Sondheim's influence; I just prefer Jack, and Cinderella, and Red Ridinghood, and other fairy-tale characters. "Jack and the Beanstalk" centers on an incautious boy. He trades his cow for magic beans. The beans are, in fact, magical; they yield an enormous beanstalk. Using the stalk, the boy begins to steal from an ogre couple up in the heavens. (The wife seems to aid and abet Jack; we might look more closely at the ogre marriage.) Eventually, a talking harp sells Jack out--but crafty Jack ensures that the beanstalk is sliced open, and the angry ogre spills down to his death, bef...