Genre: Humor / Remake / Fairy Tales / Magic

 

Year Published: 1992

 

Year Read: 2004

 

Back in 1989, “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs” was the most popular children’s book ever written and that’s where the Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith team made their famous trademark as children’s book writers. In 1992, a new children’s book, made by the Scieszka/Smith team has proclaimed its hallmark of fame as one of the funniest books ever written. That book is called “The Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales,” and has became a classic in its own right and won numerous awards, including the 1993 Caldecott Honor Book.

 

“The Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales” is one of the few books that contain so much humor. The humor is sarcastic as it is witty and the humor gives each character in the story a very unique personality that makes the reader want to be like them. Jon Scieszka’s storytelling is probably the book’s major strong point as he fills the book with witty humor such as, the Little Red Hen continuously popping up as an interlude to the other stories and the giant trying to make his own story by sticking together an odd assortment of pictures and words together. Lane Smith’s illustrations are fantastic and humorous, especially of the image of the wolf and Little Red Running Shorts leaving the story as it seems that they were cut out of the image of the house and the woods leaving two white spaces in the image.

 

“The Stinky Cheese Man” is a pure classic that will make people laugh for many years. Its good sense of humor and creative drawings by the dynamic duo, Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith has made this book an international success. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in good humor and creativity from the Scieszka/Smith duo.

 

Review is also on: Rabbit Ears Book Blog

I cannot put into words how much I love this book. I remember discovering it after The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, but I come back to this book not because of the strength of its stories (let’s face it, they are humorous but little more than worth a few chuckles) but because of how meta the entire book is. Jack the narrator takes the reader on a chaotic uphill climb through what makes up a physical book and highlights the unwritten rules behind the structure of books by breaking

EVERY

SINGLE

ONE

OF

THEM. Whether it’s text on an end page, a falling table of contents that appears after the end of the first story, or a story made up cut out fragments that starts with The End and ends with Once Upon a Time, this book keeps you guessing while pointing out conventions and expectations you didn’t even realize you had.

While this book may have come out a few years ago, in this current time where ebooks are becoming the norm and fewer people consistently by hard copies of books, I believe a book that makes one question and think about what physically makes up a book is perhaps even more relevant. It can also work to show children parts of books they would never think about otherwise and show how and why hard copy books are set up the way they are.

One of the other great parts of this book are the wonderful illustrations made up of a collage picture and pieces of paper pieced together into unique and fascinating pictures.

Also, children will enjoy the fairly stupid quality of these insane retellings of fairy tales. Just make sure they also get a chance to compare these to the originals.

That is really my one problem with the plethora of retellings, rewritings, and insane mash ups of well-known fairytales; I believe that for some children they are not well known and these humorous rewrites are becoming their norm. That rather ruins the point of these and denies the children of traditional stories that are still relevant. They may not be perfect but they still have something to teach us.

I was always a little skeptical of this book, but we finally read it a few months ago and it is just super fun! Kids really enjoy the mixed up fairy tales and the illustrations are fun and engaging. (1993 Caldecott Honor)

As much as I enjoy a fractured fairy tale, these didn't do more than briefly amuse me.

They keep making postmodernism accessible to younger and younger age groups. This is a typical postmodern take on the fairy-story genre - they even present Jack the Giant-Killer as an infinite regress of meta-stories - but it's done skillfully enough that I've met bright 6-year-olds who found it funny and got the point.

The rest of this review is in my book What Pooh Might Have Said to Dante and Other Futile Speculations