From Publishers Weekly
Scieszka ( The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales ) and Adel lend a few demented twists to familiar nursery verse in this puzzlesome but polished yarn. As in the "House That Jack Built," a cause-and-effect chain is steadily built ("This is the Cat / That ate the Rat / . . . That lay in the book that Jack wrote"). Adel, whose illustrations have appeared in the New York Times , contributes bizarre but virtuosic paintings that evoke Alice in Wonderland by way of Francis Bacon. His Cat, for instance, has unsettlingly human teeth and a wide Cheshire grin from which dangles the unfortunate Rat's tail; a Hatter a la John Tenniel shows up later. Adel's sophisticated compositions, set against white ground, incorporate picture frames that give each portrait a 3-D, lifelike quality. Scieszka's detached narrative seems straightforward at first, but gets weirder as the passage of time goes out-of-whack. When, at the conclusion, a "book that Jack wrote" falls on and flattens a Man, the Man's feet protrude from beneath the book--but those feet were present from the story's first page. Readers who require logic will be stymied; those who appreciate near-Victorian oddities and Escher-like conundrums will tumble right in. Ages 5-up.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
Grade 1-6-An updated version of "This Is the House That Jack Built," this cumulative tale tells of a blind rat who falls into a picture in the book that Jack wrote, thus setting off a chain of events in which the players are done in one by one until nothing is left but the book itself. The characters are borrowed largely from children's literature-a grinning Cheshiresque cat, a cow jumping over the moon, a pieman at the fair, Humpty Dumpty, and the Mad Hatter-but they bear only a passing resemblance to their traditional forms. Cynical expressions followed by looks of terror are the order of the day as each character meets its fate. The text initially follows the rhythm of the original rhyme; however, as it progresses, the meter changes and the cadence becomes somewhat jarring. The dark tones of Adel's full-page oil paintings are a fine match for the irreverent mood of the piece. The humor comes from their surreal quality-distorted bodies sport extremely large heads. Not for the timid, they portray a cow's pronounced udder hovering over the dog's head, a baby getting "beaned" with a pie, and a man with a sadistic grin happily smashing an annoying bug. Featuring an even more twisted brand of humor than Scieszka's The Stinky Cheese Man (Viking, 1992), this work will serve as a fine introduction to parody for young creative writers.
Nancy Menaldi-Scanlan, Wheeler School, Providence, RICopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
