This is wonderfully irreverent collection of mixed up nursery rhymes. This book takes traditional nursery rhymes the Gingerbread Man becomes the Stinky Cheese Man, and the Ugly Duckling does not grow into a beautiful swan, but an Ugly Duck instead. I really love the dark humor that Scieszka and Smith use to season this collection of stories.
I would incorporate this book into a library program by reading it aloud. The library would have a selection of five short nursery rhymes written out of papers. Then have each participant in the program select their own rhyme to fracture.
PROFESSIONAL BOOK REVIEW FROM PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Grade-school irreverence abounds in this compendium of (extremely brief) fractured fairy tales, which might well be subtitled "All Things Gross and Giddy." With a relentless application of the sarcasm that tickled readers of The True Story of the Three Little Pigs , Scieszka and Smith skewer a host of juvenile favorites: Little Red Running Shorts beats the wolf to grandmother's house; the Really Ugly Duckling matures into a Really Ugly Duck; Cinderumpelstiltskin is "a girl who really blew it." Text and art work together for maximum comic impact--varying styles and sizes of type add to the illustrations' chaos, as when Chicken Licken discovers that the Table of Contents, and not the sky, is falling. Smith's art, in fact, expands upon his previous waggery to include increased interplay between characters, and even more of his intricate detail work. The collaborators' hijinks are evident in every aspect of the book, from endpapers to copyright notice. However, the zaniness and deadpan delivery that have distinguished their previous work may strike some as overdone here. This book's tone is often frenzied; its rather specialized humor, delivered with the rapid-fire pacing of a string of one-liners, at times seems almost mean-spirited. Ages 5-up.
Scieszka, J., & Smith, L. (1992). The Stinky Cheese Man and other fairly stupid tales . New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking.
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