Horn Book (Wed Jul 06 00:00:00 CDT 2022)

This story connects characters from many different nursery stories: for example, before Jack got his magic beans, he fell down a hill with his sister. Children familiar with the tales will have fun guessing the sequence of events and exploring the acrylic illustrations, which show several happenings on each spread.

Kirkus Reviews (Wed Jul 06 00:00:00 CDT 2022)

Along the same lines as David LaRochelle and Richard Egielski's The End (February 2007), but using more predictable elements, Ahlberg and Ingman present a set of linked tales in rewind mode. Goldilocks arrives home "all bothered and hot." Why? Because previously she had run through the forest, having climbed out of somebody's window in the wake of being caught sleeping in someone's bed, etc. Even before that, she had bumped into a lad named Jack with a hen under his arm . . . and so on, through Jack and Jill, the Frog Prince, Cinderella and others—and yet further back, to when all the characters were babies and, even further, the dark woods were seedlings "in the sun and the wind and the rain / under the endless sky, once upon a time. Previously." In Ingman's thickly brushed cartoons, small figures in contemporary dress dash through rolling fields and thick forest before regressing to a spread of diaper-clad infants, then giving way to open, almost abstract landscape. The title word's repetition creates a verbal pattern that comes out more clearly when spoken aloud, but even solitary young readers will follow the plot easily—in either direction. (Picture book. 6-8)

School Library Journal (Wed Jul 06 00:00:00 CDT 2022)

PreS-Gr 2-This reverse cumulative tale cleverly connects some fairy tales and nursery rhymes. "Goldilocks arrived home all bothered and hot. Previously she had been running like mad in the dark woods. Previously she had been climbing out of somebody else's window." Previously, she had bumped into Jack who "was running like mad in the dark woods with a hen under his arm." Cinderella was "bumped into by-The Gingerbread Boy" and his whole group of followers. The ingenuous acrylic paintings mirror the turnabouts artfully so that, for example, Jack appears four times on the same spread: falling down a hill with Jill, playing soccer, talking with his mother, and exchanging a cow for some beans. The jazzy, colorful pictures display substantive variety: silhouetted figures dance at Cinderella's ball; she previously runs through trees that rise out of Impressionist-like blue-dotted ground; the prince who danced with Cinderella changes into a frog; his head visibly transforms in a series of views atop his normal head. Read this book aloud so that youngsters can chime in and shout the word "previously" 29 times. Children will delight in this energetic, amusing, and very approachable tale.-Kirsten Cutler, Sonoma County Library, CA Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.