The True Story of the Three Little Pigs [Paperback]

Did the story of the three little pigs ever seem slightly biased to you? All that huffing and puffing--could one wolf really be so unequivocally evil? Finally, we get to hear the rest of the story, "as told to author Jon Scieszka," straight from the wolf's mouth. As Alexander T. Wolf explains it, the whole Big Bad Wolf thing was just a big misunderstanding. Al Wolf was minding his own business, making his granny a cake, when he realized he was out of a key ingredient. He innocently went from house to house to house (one made of straw, one of sticks, and one of bricks) asking to borrow a cup of sugar. Could he help it if he had a bad cold, causing him to sneeze gigantic, gale-force sneezes? Could he help it if pigs these days use shabby construction materials? And after the pigs had been ever-so-accidentally killed, well, who can blame him for having a snack?

As with The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, (another stellar collaboration by Scieszka and illustrator Lane Smith), children who know all the old stories by heart will delight in reading impudent new versions. Here, Scieszka's text is clever, savvy, and tabloid-quick, and Smith's stretchy-strange illustrations complete this funny, irreverent, thoroughly original tale. (Ages 4 to 8) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

"Designed with uncommon flair," said PW, this "gaily newfangled version of the classic tale" takes sides with the villain. "Imaginative watercolors eschew realism, further updating the tale." A Spanish-language reprint will be issued simultaneously ($4.99, -055758-X). Ages 3-8.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Grade 1 Up--Victim for centuries of a bad press, Alexander ("You can call me Al") T. Wolf steps forward at last to give his side of the story. Trying to borrow a cup of sugar to make a cake for his dear old Granny, Al calls on his neighbors--and can he help it if two of them built such shoddy houses? A couple of sneezes, a couple of dead pigs amidst the wreckage and, well, it would be shame to let those ham dinners spoil, wouldn't it? And when the pig in the brick house makes a nasty comment about Granny, isn't it only natural to get a little steamed? It's those reporters from the Daily Pig that made Al out to be Big and Bad, that caused him to be arrested and sent to the (wait for it) Pig Pen. "I was framed," he concludes mournfully. Smith's dark tones and sometimes shadowy, indistinct shapes recall the distinctive illustrations he did for Merriam's Halloween ABC (Macmillan, 1987); the bespectacled wolf moves with a rather sinister bonelessness, and his juicy sneezes tear like thunderbolts through a dim, grainy world. It's the type of book that older kids (and adults) will find very funny.
-John Peters, New York Public Library
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Ages 6-9.

Jon Scieszka's The True Story of the Three Little Pigs (1989) turned the favorite porkers' story upside-down by allowing the grossly misjudged wolf to tell his side of the story. Wiesner's latest is a post-modern fantasy for young readers that takes Scieszka's fragmentation a step further: it not only breaks apart and deliciously reinvents the pigs' tale, it invites readers to step beyond the boundaries of story and picture book altogether.

The book begins predictably: the three pigs set out to seek their fortune, and when the first pig builds a house of straw, the wolf blows it down. Here's when the surprises start. The wolf blows the pig right out of the picture and out of the story itself. In the following frames, the story continues as expected: the wolf eats the pig and moves on to the other houses. But the pictures no longer match up. Frames show the bewildered wolf searching hungrily through the rubble as first one, then all the pigs escape the illustrations and caper out into open space with the loose pages of the wolf's tale swirling around them. After fashioning a paper airplane from a passing page, the emancipated pigs soar off on a sort of space flight through blank white spreads, ultimately discovering other picture-book "planets" along the way. Finally, the pigs wander through a near-city of illustrated pages, each suggesting its own story. Joined by the nursery rhyme Cat and Fiddle and a fairy-tale dragon, the pigs find and reassemble the pages to their own story and reenter to find the wolf still at the door. In the end, the story breaks down altogether, as the wolf flees, the text breaks apart, letters spill into a waiting basket, and the animals settle down to a bowl of . . . alphabet soup instead of wolf stew.

Wiesner uses shifting, overlapping artistic styles to help young readers envision the pigs' fantastical voyage. The story begins in a traditional, flat, almost old-fashioned illustrative style. But once the first pig leaps from the picture's frame, he becomes more shaded, bristly with texture, closer to a photographic image. As the pigs travel and enter each new story world, they take on the style of their surroundings--the candy-colored nursery rhyme, the almost comic-book fairy tale--until, in the end, they appear as they did at the beginning. Chatty dialogue balloons also help guide children through the story, providing most of the text once the characters leave the conventional story frames, and much of the humor ("Let's get out of here!" yells one pig as he leaps from a particularly saccharine nursery world). Despite all these clues, children may need help understanding what's happening, particularly with the subtle, open-ended conclusion. But with their early exposure to the Internet and multimedia images, many kids will probably be comfortable shifting between frames and will follow along with delight. Wiesner has created a funny, wildly imagined tale that encourages kids to leap beyond the familiar, to think critically about conventional stories and illustration, and perhaps to flex their imaginations and create wonderfully subversive versions of their own stories. Carolyn Phelan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"Deconstructionist", "surreal" and "iconoclastic" are a few of the adjectives critics have reached for to describe Jon Scieszka's work. Well, it's all true! But as clever as he is, what really marks out this author is his sense of humour. Could he be more deadpan?! Check out THE STINKY CHEESE MAN AND OTHER FAIRLY STUPID TALES and we guarantee you'll never look at a children's book in the same way again.