David Shannon’s fabulous artwork illustrates this modern tale alluding to the folktale of King Midas. In Shannon’s version, young Maximilian Midas’s first word is gold, and his obsession leads him into unscrupulous ways in his efforts to acquire the shiny substance, from cheating on all his tests in school to accumulate gold stars to sabotaging the efforts of the lemonade stand competition. He spends all his earnings on gold until he has a mountain of it, topped with a castle with a gold fountain. When he takes to the idea of sprinkling gold dust on his breakfast cereal, he finds himself transformed into a gold statue, alone in his castle, forced to watched the joyful life going along outside his window without him. When he’s moved enough to shed the last tear he has within himself, it melts his statue self as well as his mountain, allowing him to return to his family and neighborhood a changed boy, ready to share his millions to make the world a better place because he’s learned that gold can’t make you feel as good as being nice. The rich humor of Shannon’s artwork and the silly rhyming text he uses to tell his story allows the message to be delivered without seeming overly pedantic.