It’s back to school time! For our next Children’s Book Club, Friday, September 10, we’ll read Anna Dewdney’s Llama Llama Misses Mama and find out what happens when little Llama goes to school. Maybe every tale holds multiple stories inside it. Maybe they want to laugh as the wolf waves a white handkerchief embossed with fuzzy pink sheep. Maybe they want a story told from the villain’s perspective. But they are not the only reasons a child may want to read a book. We grownups tend to get ideas about what kinds of books kids will like: this one won an award, or this one teaches important lessons, or this one has a corresponding TV show or movie. “Don’t ever come back here, okay?” they said.Įventually Viking Books bought the story, changed the name, and the rest, as they say, is, well, 3 million copies in fourteen languages. Here is what he says about the early reactions of publishers to this tale: He then took some time off to write and, with illustrator Lane Smith, created A. While working as a teacher, he began to share the stories he was writing with his students. Even though it is filled with wolf attitude.Īuthor Jon Scieszka has written other fractured fairy tales, along with many other books. But wait, wolves can’t help their teeth, can they? Maybe we need to read a copy of The Daily Wolf to compare and contrast and decide the truth for ourselves. One article has a close-up of a wolf’s teeth, the big bad sharp fangs of Canis lupus. One illustration is of a newspaper, The Daily Pig, with “All the News That’s Fit For Pigs.” Fit for pigs, not for wolves. Wolf being hauled away by the police to jail, aka the Pig Penn.īut the pictures at the end invite us to again reconsider what we know. Some versions of this old, old story end in a fairly gruesome manner, but this one ends with A. The first two pigs are eaten - “Now you know food will spoil if you just leave it out in the open” - and the wolf gets what he has coming to him. The picture lets us know this wolf is not to be trusted.įor the most part, the plot of this fairy tale doesn’t change. But in the mixing bowl, none of the eggs have been broken, and, even worse, a pair of bunny ears are sticking out. In this book, they sometimes contradict the wolf’s words.įor example, the wolf says he needs to borrow a cup of sugar because he is baking a birthday cake for his dear old granny.

Good picture books use illustrations to convey information that is not in the text. But part of the genius is in the illustrations. The first time I read this book aloud to my kids, I could hardly get the words out, I was laughing so hard. Even though he acknowledges that wolves do “eat cute little animals like bunnies and sheep and pigs,” he says, “If cheeseburgers were cute, folks would probably think you were Big and Bad, too.” And sometimes the perspective is changed, like in this story.Ī. Sometimes the tales change the character, like in the movie Hoodwinked, in which cool, hip Granny needs no one to protect her. Sometimes they change the plot, like in Malinda Lo’s Ash, in which Cinderella lives happily ever after with the Huntress. Wolf.įractured fairy tales restructure and reimagine old stories. Thus begins this fractured fairy tale, (alas, with zero fairies) narrated by Alexander T. Nobody knows the real story, because nobody has ever heard my side of the story.” The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs (Wolf’s honor!)Įverybody knows the true story of the 3 little pigs.

The little pigs sugar story