Rika Lesser is an award-winning American poet and translator; Paul O. Zelinsky is the recipient of the 1998 Caldecott Medal and several Caldecott Honors for his illustrations of children’s picture books. In 1984, they published their collaborative effort, a picture book retelling of Hansel and Gretel. Although Lesser’s spare storytelling closely follows the Grimm brothers’ 1812 version of the tale, and Zelinsky’s illustrations recall old-school oil paintings, reviews commend the picture book’s originality and beauty. Praising it as “a triumph of children’s literature,” Publishers Weekly concludes that the “artfully understated retelling and magnificent paintings result in an unsurpassable presentation of the ancient fairy tale.”
The first page of the story features an earth-toned picture of a rustic family studying, with forlorn faces, the father’s small handful of coins. Below this illustration, the text reads, “At the edge of a great forest, there once lived a poor woodcutter.” He is unhappy because he struggles to put enough food on the table for his wife and two children, Hansel and Gretel.
The day soon arrives when the family has just one loaf of bread remaining to split between the four of them. That night, believing the children to be asleep, the wife proposes a plan to dispense with them. She tells her husband to take the children to the forest early in the morning, provide them with breadcrusts and a fire, and then abandon them. Although distressed by his wife’s scheme, the beleaguered husband reluctantly agrees to do her bidding.
The children are, in fact, awake and overhear their parents’ plan. After sharing their alarm with one another, Hansel devises a clever strategy to safeguard himself and his little sister. He sneaks outside and, in the light of the shining moon, collects glistening, white pebbles. With his pockets full of the small rocks, Hansel returns to bed.
The woodcutter wakes his children just as dawn is breaking. Before the family sets out for the forest, the mother gives a piece of bread to each child. As Hansel’s pockets are stuffed with pebbles, Gretel puts his share of bread under her apron. While walking the path into the woods, Hansel frequently turns and gazes back, claiming he’s watching his kitten who’s perched on their rooftop. In truth, with each pause, Hansel drops a pebble.
Hansel and Gretel sit by their fire in the woods as instructed by their parents. When the sun begins to sink, however, they rise and follow the trail of pebbles back home. The woodcutter is overjoyed to see his children again, but his wife expresses frustration and dismay.
Determined to rid herself of extra mouths to feed, the wife tells her husband they must take the children into the forest again, but this time, deeper into the dark thicket. She’s aware of Hansel’s pebble-trail trick and locks the doors to prevent him from repeating it. The next morning, as they take the path into the forest, Hansel again turns and pauses every so often. When his mother questions his delays, he says he’s looking at a pigeon on the roof of their house, but he’s really turning to drop breadcrumbs.
Once again, the sun sets as the children sit in the forest. But when they try to find the bits of bread marking the way home, they’re gone. Wild animals have eaten Hansel’s crumbs. After a chilling night in the forest, Hansel and Gretel stumble across a fantastic dwelling in the woods. Its roof is made of tempting pancakes, and what appear to be stained-glass windows are actually colorful candy.
The famished children begin to nibble at the house, drawing the attention of the gnarled, old woman who lives there. At her invitation, they go inside the magical house, but quickly realize their mistake. With unexpected agility, the old woman maneuvers Hansel into a stall and locks him in. She tells Gretel she plans to first fatten Hansel and then eat him, and Gretel must help her.
Day after day the old woman pinches Hansel’s finger to gauge his plumpness, but because he slyly substitutes a bone for the vision-impaired woman to test, she’s continually disappointed. Finally, she tells Gretel that the next morning she is “going to slaughter and boil him.” At daybreak, she orders Gretel to check the fire in the enormous oven. Feigning confusion about the ins and outs of ovens, Gretel asks the old woman for help. The unwitting witch approaches the door, and Gretel pushes her into the scorching oven. After Gretel slams the door shut, “the old witch screamed and howled [… and] burned to ashes.”
Freed from captivity, Hansel and Gretel loot the old crone’s house. They pocket her sizeable cache of gems and jewels and run off into the forest, eventually finding their way home again. The woodcutter and his children are thrilled to be reunited. Because of their mother’s untimely death during their absence, Hansel and Gretel need not fear being abandoned in the woods again. The father and children enjoy their newfound fortune and live happily ever after.
Rika Lesser appends her retelling of Hansel and Gretel with a “Storyteller’s Note” that provides a short history of the tale. Lesser explains that Hansel and Gretel was originally a German oral folktale. When Wilhelm Grimm transcribed the story as told to him by a member of the Wild family, he titled it “Little Brother and Little Sister.” In 1812, Wilhelm and his brother Jacob published a longer version of the tale, now titled “Hansel and Gretel,” in Children’s and Household Tales. Lesser notes that her retelling of the story “strongly invokes the 1810 and 1812 Grimm versions.”
In a 1986 Horn Book interview, Paul O. Zelinsky revealed that “he patterned his illustrations” in Hansel and Gretel “after seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings such as those by the painter Steen.” Using watercolor with an oil overlay, Zelinsky created pictures that recall Renaissance masterpieces and vividly match the haunting pitch of Lesser’s storytelling. Zelinsky received his first Caldecott Honor for his Hansel and Gretel illustrations.
