Dom DeLuise's Hansel & Gretel

DeLuise, Dom. Dom DeLuise's Hansel & Gretel. Illus. Christopher Santoro. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

Before I tell you how much I disliked this book, allow me to digress for a moment: I know that part of the tradition of fairy and folk tales, of oral tradition in general, is the re-telling and re-shaping of stories over time. That change is part of vitality. That there are re-worked and even fractured fairy tales that break open the story to allow for new and exciting narrative possibilities while leaving the magic of storytelling intact (David Wiesner's brilliant telling of The Three Pigs, for instance). There are also, however, some re-tellings of old stories that leave the story not broken open but simply broken, that substitute clever for compelling, that take the didactic element so far that the balance between story and telling is completely lost in favour of a thinly-disguised agenda. For me, Dom Deluise's Hansel & Gretel is such a book.

In this re-telling, Hansel and Gretel live in a poor but health-concious family. They long for sugar treats, but instead pie a la mode they are offered healthy fruit choices for dessert. After their mother dies, they are left in the woods when their father re-marries a cranky widow who hates children. The inevitable candy house in the forest is inhabited by Miss Glut Annie Stout, a glutonous and terrifying women who imprisons them and forces them to bake for her. Eventually they escape, and gratefully return to their father's home (he has since ditched the evil step-mother) where they live heathily and happily ever after.

This is an excellent example of a book that aligns fairly well with my own values - I am deathly against the over-sugaring of children and can't eat sugar myself - and yet manages to offend every fibre of my being. But perhaps this is not quite fair since I do have issues with how the "childhood obesity" campaigns play themselves out in North America, and this book represents some of the worst of those problems. Let me just say that I am not in favour of childhood obesity, but that I worry about how current publicity only ends up feeding the stigmatization of fatness (and I'm fairly sure that eating disorders haven't disappeared - they're just not the flavour of the month any more) instead of truly changing our approach to health and excercise. Here is an excellent example of a villain who is evil (and grossly fat) because of her bad and unhealthy behaviour around food, while a loving family is measured by the the health of the foods eaten: "He took excellent care of his children for many years, and every night they all wished each other not sweet dreams but golden dreams (fewer calories). They were a family again. A loving, fat-free, healthy family who lived happily ever after."

In an effort to be clever and witty, the writing adopts a self-conciously sarcastic tone which undercuts the power of the narrative, tries to cater to both children and adult audiences while appealing to neither, and often ends up falling flat:

""Home? Ha, Ha. Never! You'll live here and help me make puddings, cakes, and pies." The children trembled. It was clear that Miss Glut Annie Stout was (a) completely unaware of how unhealthy all that fat and sugar is! and (b) not very nice. . . not very nice, indeed!" So the children worked as hard as they could helping Glut Annie Stout while she cooked and cooked . . . and cooked."

To give the illustrator credit, the bright cartoon-like illustrations are much more convincing as a diatribe against sugar and junk food: The frenetic, sugary, sticky spreads of life inside the candy house - in which oversized cakes and sundaes and plates of greasy breakfast food tower over the small figures - create a visceral reaction that was enough to put me off sweets for quite a while.

While some teachers or parents might be tempted to use this book to teach about healthy eating habits and the dangers of sugar and junk food, I just don't think it's worth it. Not only is the story un-compelling and somewhat condescending, the message focuses much more on calories and cholesterol than it does on healthy eating. And do we want to suggest that parents don't really love their children if they feed them junk food?