In her introduction to Tell Me a Story, Gold points out that the stories are written from the child's point of view at different ages. At best, though, the point of view in many of the stories is inconsistent. There are clearly times when an adult is looking back at her childhood. In the story called "The Flower Lady," talking about a farmer in their summer in the Catskills, she calls him "our epicure teacher." The cooking in the community kitchen created "a symphony of smells." This is the language of an adult looking back on her past, as she makes crystal clear in the story's concluding paragraph. Often even when the child is speaking, her language and phrasing are anything but childlike. Nonetheless, the voice of the child, when she actually speaks as a child, as in her description of her mother cleaning the freshly killed chicken for soup, is much less literary and quite endearing in its simplicity.
Gold's paintings are something special. She is a member of the Silver Lake Art Collective in Los Angeles, and her work has a primitive emotional quality bathed in vibrant color. Her past is not played out in fuzzy pastels; it lives on in the brightness of her palette. A visit to her blog will give you a better idea of her painting than anything I could add. Taken together, the stories and the paintings are an emotional tribute to a time and place perhaps gone but not yet forgotten.
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