A girl named Goldilocks has just arrived home, all “bothered and hot” from a mad rush through the woods. “Previously she had been sleeping in somebody else’s bed, eating somebody else’s porridge, and breaking somebody else’s chair! . . . Previously she had bumped into a hurling and older boy named . . . Jack.” It turns out Jack is running like mad as well, away from the beanstalk he’d just descended. Previously, he’d done an unlikely trade: his cow for magic beans. Before that, he’d been playing soccer. And before that, “he had come tumbling down the high hill with his argumentative little sister . . . Jill.” Allan Ahlberg trips blithely backwards through the things that came before in the interconnected lives of four other familiar fairy tale characters in a distinctive picture book offering terrific fun for readers and listeners, and creative writing inspiration for the classroom. Where does it all end? At the origins of it all, of course: “once upon a time.” (Ages 4–9)

The adventures of nursery characters, including Goldilocks, the Frog Prince, and Cinderella, are told in reverse sequence and with all the stories linked together. Once you get into the rhythm of the sequence of events, you begin to anticipate what will happen next—that is, what happened pre viously. Ingman’s illustrations detail the reverse sequence of each tale and provide visual links to the next one. The ending is particularly inventive as the characters are shown as the tiny babies that they were “once upon a time

Originally published by Walker Books Great Britain, in 2007.