French: Max le gourmand, Paris: L'École des loisirs, 1995.

This picture book retells the myth of Midas and the golden touch. Like Wells’ treatment of the story of Pandora, this myth is presented as a moral parable embedded within a frame narrative featuring the rabbit siblings Max and Ruby. The story opens in their kitchen, with Max crooning ‘Hello, Beautiful!’ to a pink cupcake. Ruby catches him concealing cupcakes underneath his pyjamas. Putting him back to bed, she announces that she will read him ‘a bedtime story about someone whose sweet tooth got out of control.’ Prince Midas hates fruit and vegetables, and develops laser-beam eyes that can change healthy food into delicious sweets. Unfortunately, his gaze also targets his mother, father, and sister, who are transformed into desserts, complete with unhappy faces. Missing his family and full of regret, Max searches the house, finally discovering them gathered in the kitchen for dinner, returned to their original form, and offering him hot fudge sundae for dessert. Having learnt his lesson, Midas zaps the sundae into broccoli. It is less clear whether Max has grasped Ruby’s lesson. When she finishes reading the story he appears to have fallen asleep, but as she leaves his room he can be seen, silhouetted against the moonlit window, about to devour a stolen cupcake. ‘Good night, Beautiful’, he says, and it is left open whether he is bidding farewell to the cake or his sister.  

In this rendering of the myth, the golden touch is replaced by the ability to transform healthy food into sweets, so that gluttony becomes the focus of the story. (A similar approach was taken by Patrick Skene Catling in The Chocolate Touch (1952)). For a child audience, the desire for food, and particularly sweets, is potentially more relatable than the more abstract concept of gold. As Ruby reads aloud to Max, the text self-consciously references the transmission of the mythic tradition through storytelling.  The text showcases the use of myth to teach a moral lesson, though as in all her Max and Ruby stories, Wells is ambivalent about whether Max has actually learned anything. 

Wells seems to revel in the task of visually depicting the ancient setting, hiding witty and anachronistic details within the illustrations. The endpapers feature a row of Minoan bulls above leporine statues resembling the Discobolos and Athena Parthenos. The story of Midas is distinguished from the frame narrative using pale green paper and borders featuring repeated patterns of the Greek key design and olive branches. Midas’ palace has Ionic columns, friezes with more Minoan bulls, and black figure pottery vessels. The hot fudge sundae is served in a huge blue krater encircled with a design of white rabbits. Max’s laser-beam eyes glow red as he turns his mother into a cherry float and his sister Athena into a slice of birthday cake, but go green when he tries to zap the sundae into a bowl of broccoli. The power of his gaze contains an echo of Medusa’s petrifying stare, but this lighthearted story resists delving too deeply into the world of classical mythology.  

Review, January 5, 1995, online at publishersweekly.com (accessed: September 19, 2018).