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Summary: Hands down, my favorite book for children
Review: Don't look for these twisted fairy tales to provide moral lessons. But the words and photos will charm your kids and make them laugh. This is easily my favorite book for kids -- and they love it too!
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Summary: Still is One of My Favorites......Even Today!!!
Review: Hey, I may be in college, but this was a book I read all the time when I was little. I'm currently taking Children's Lit, which requires me reading 70 children's books. I found this one burried in my room, forgetting that I still owned it. I read it, and it still made me laugh. "The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales" is one entertaining book.It's some of your favorite fairy tales.....except told in parody form. They're hillarious. My favorites are "Jack's Bean Problem," "Little Red Running Shorts," "Chicken Licken," and "The Really Ugly Duckling." But they're all very funny. The Little Red Hen will crack you up as she blabbers on about how no one is helping her and how horrible this book is.
The book is by Jon Scieszka and is illustrated by Lane Smith. It doesn't matter how old you are, this is one of the funniest children's book I have ever read. Fun for all ages. Great writing and pictures. Have a look whenever you can. I'm sure you will not regret it.
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Summary: would never want to read again
Review: I cannot believe all the good reviews for this book. I got this book out of a recommendation from another book of children's reading. My 6 year old and now-12 year old were not impressed.
The book makes stupid spin-offs from the classic fairy tales. I will stick with the originals.
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Summary: The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales
Review: I first discovered "The Stinky Cheese Man" at the age of 10. I was in a children's museum and found the book laying around somewhere. I flipped through it and fell in love with the illustrations. They were different from other kids' books and looked slightly familiar (Lane Smith does the cover art for Roald Dahl's "James and the Giant Peach). And the stories were hilarious! I didn't feel bad that I was this 10 year old reading stories like "Jack's Bean Problem" or "Cinderrumpelstiltskin (or the Girl who Really Blew It)". I grew up knowing the real stories and here was this book that actually MADE FUN OF THEM and had sorta weird pictures. It was like a morbid a 10 year old could get. These weren't just regular fairy tales to me. They were what would have REALLY happened if fairy tales happened in the "real world". Twelve years later, as a full grown adult, I still have this book. As I got older, I gave away virtually all my children's books, but this one I couldn't part with. If I ever have kids one day, I'll be so excited to share "The Stinky Cheese Man" with them.
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Summary: Cow Patty!
Review: LOVE this book! About half the humor is for grown-ups, but don't be afraid to try it out with a kid around the 1st grade level. My son and I laugh ourselves silly whenever we read the book. The art is great, and I love the hidden story on the inside of the dust jacket. This is an oddly put together book (that's part of the hook), so it can be challenging to read the first couple of times, but it's certainly worth the effort.
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Summary: Run run as fast as you can...
Review: Making use of every bookflap, endpaper, table of contents, flyleaf, and ISBN box, Jon Scieszka (go on...pronounce it) and Lane Smith teamed up to bring us the picture book that gives kids a lot more credit than most. Many adults will sit their little ones down with the same boring fairy tales with the same boring fairy tale lessons. Kids like fairy tales, no question, but kids also love the subversive. So if you hand them a book like, "The Stinky Cheese Man", that undermines everything fairy tales stand for, the children will fall on their knees in praise. The book is a madcap collection of dismembered tales and stories. Didn't much care for the ending of the original "Ugly Duckling"? Well here's your chance to see the real (and realistic) finale to the tale. Think "Little Red Riding Hood" could be pepped up a bit by calling it, "Little Red Running Shorts"? Go wild. Scieszka is one of those rare authors that know exactly how to get little kids in stitches without resorting to the usual scatological humor and innuendo. This book is one wild ride. Characters frequently break through the fourth wall to confront the reader directly. There's a mixing and melding to the book, sometimes ending with the untimely demise of boring or annoying characters. I think it is safe to say that prior to reading this story, I had never had the pleasure of watching Foxy Loxy get pummeled by a book's Table of Contents. So thank you, Mr. Scieszka. But thanking Scieszka without tipping one's hat to Lane Smith is like feeding bananas to buffalos. It just doesn't make sense. Smith is every bit up to the task of matching Scieszka feather to feather and foul to foul on this intrepid fairy tale adventure. Characters appearing in this book look like nothing so much as a nightmare of texts, fabrics, and shapes. Lane has always reminded me of graphic novelist Dave McKean (of "The Wolves in the Walls" fame), but with a few more childlike sensibilities. These pictures are meant to disturb, but not scare. Rather than finding Lane's grotesqueries fierce, children are endlessly amused by them. And to be frank, so am I. They're great. This book, is great. And the experience of reading it is nothing but a fan-freakin'-tastic experience.
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Summary: Complete waste of breath
Review: My five year old, who avidly listens to me read him chapters of Roald Dahl's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, completely zoned out when I attempted to read these stupid stories. He was bored and uninterested in every one, as was I. The book is written with a smug self-congratulatory undertone, but how this trash got an Honor medal beats me.
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Summary: great kids book for adults to read aloud!
Review: My son loved this book and I read it aloud to him often. We laughed ourselves silly every time too! Buy this book and read it to your kids! A collection of classic tales like no other!
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Summary: danger, repeated reading required
Review: Our family came at this a little bit sideways. We picked up The Book That Jack Wrote first, mostly because the paintings by Daniel Adel are absolutely
extraordinary, though the rhyme, by Jon Scieszka, based on the classic The House that Jack Built, is fun too. Then I realized that Mr. Scieszka was the author
of both The Stinky Cheese Man, which you often see on recommended book lists, and The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs, which several other authors of
childrens' books had chosen as one of their favorites in Salon Magazine several years ago. So now we own all three and read them almost every night. It's somewhat absurd that we refer to the use of self-reference and the ironic blend of fact and fiction within fiction as post-modern, since such elements were
used in one of the first novels ever written, Don Quijote, and have never gone terribly far out of fashion since. Nor is childrens' literature a stranger to these
techniques, as a generation of parents who were raised on Jay Ward's Fractured Fairy Tales can well attest. But Mr. Scieszka is an adept practitioner of the
style and it does tend to make kids' books easier for adults to read and enjoy. The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs is written from the perspective of Alexander T. Wolf as he explains that the whole story is really just a big
misunderstanding, mostly the result of sensationalistic journalism. Meanwhile, The Stinky Cheese Man is a rather more pungent version of the Gingerbread
Man, who can't even get anyone to run, run, run as fast as they can to catch him because of the awful stench he gives off. The illustrations in these two, by
Lane Smith, are less stunning than those by Mr. Adel in The Book That Jack Wrote, but go well with the somewhat manic mood of the stories. You can't go wrong with any of the three, but be warned, your kids will require repeated readings of each or all. Book that Jack Wrote : Text : B Paintings : A+ True Story of the 3 Little Pigs and Stinky Cheese Man : Text : A Illustrations : B
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Summary: The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales
Review: The book is written by Jon Scieszka and this review was done by April. This book is one of my favorite books because I can read it over and over and still end up laughing. This book is a collection of little short stories, told by the narrator named Jack (From Jack and Beanstalk). There are 11 short stories in this book; Chicken Licken, The Princess and The Bowling Ball, The Really Ugly Duckling, The Other Frog Prince, Little Red Running Shorts, Jack's Bean Problem, Giant Story, Jack's Story, Cinderumpelstiltskin or the Girl Who Really Blew It, The Tortoise and the Hair, and finally, the Stinky Cheese Man. This whole book is about Jack, the narrator, trying to tell all about the stories in the book. He has trouble doing that because the Little Red Hen keeps interupting him when he is trying to tell a story. The reason the Little Red Hen keeps bothering him is because she wants to tell her story about baking bread and that no one helped her make it.
The most famous story in this book, is the Stinky Cheese Man. It is a knockoff of the Gingerbread Man, but of course with a strange funny twist to it. The story is about a Little Old Lady and a Little Old Man. They were both lonely, so the Little Old Lady decides to make a man out of some stinky cheese. She gave him two olives for eyes and a piece of bacon for a mouth. She put him in the oven to bake. When she opened the oven door, a strong odor fell upon the Little Old Man and the Little Old Lady. They both decide that they weren't lonely anymore. The Stinky Cheese Man goes around say that famous quote, "Run,run,run as fast you can. You can't catch me. I'm the Stinky Cheese Man!"
What will become of the Stinky Cheese Man? Will he end up like the Gingerbread Man? Will the Little Red Hen ever get to tell her story? Read these hilarous stupid tales to find out. I believe that this book is great for the whole family. The reason why is because I think everyone will enjoy it, even the adults!
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