A Voice for Independent Authors

“You can kill a book quicker by your silence than by a bad review.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri

REVIEWING TODAY: THE COST OF GOLD BY DANIEL MAULT AND JESSIE MILLER

A good children’s book, like The Cost of Gold by Daniel Mault and Jessie Miller, requires the development of many subtle and highly difficult proficiencies; the primary being a compelling story with engaging illustrations. Additionally, the story and the illustrations are dependent on each other. A consistency of voice and sight is what compels the child’s rapt attention. The illustrations in The Cost of Gold are truly lovely. An almost graphic sense of style lends a subtle sense of constructive form and origin, but a blanket of consistent softness hides any evidence of rigidity, while a marvelous and powerful radiant inner light suffuses each pastel-colored scene, evoking always the defining warmth of life. These skillful illustrations compel and provoke the most attention from this book.

The moralistic story told in The Cost of Gold is a good one, relating and proclaiming the intangible virtues of friendship and family over the concrete perils of materialistic greed. A young boy and his sister are presumably offered “the keys to the kingdom” by a magic golden frog who speaks only to the girl. The one requirement to attain such riches is to leave mom and dad behind. The story told in combination with such exquisite illustrations would be better served by sharing their utter self-containment – each picture worth more than the less-than-concise verbal paragraph meant to describe what is going on. Still, the characters are engaging and the story has a good foundation. Daniel Mault and Jessie Miller have partnered to create a children’s book highly appealing to the young audience they seek.