King Midas and the Golden Touch

King Midas has more gold than he can count, and it is not enough. When a stranger grants him one wish, he asks that everything he touches turn to gold — and for a morning it is everything he hoped for. Then he reaches for his breakfast. Then he reaches for his daughter.

Charlotte Craft retells the Greek myth in plain, unhurried prose, and Kinuko Y. Craft illustrates it in the dense, jewel-lit style of a Renaissance painting — gilded borders, deep interiors, a court rendered in oil. The pictures do a good deal of the arguing: the more gold fills the frame, the colder it gets.

A picture book for readers who like their fairy tales with real weight, and a myth whose moral has not needed updating in two and a half thousand years.