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Item Barcode | Collection | Call Number | Status | Item Holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 33607000880503 | Picture Books | SCIESZKA | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
The author of the Caldecott Honor book The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales pokes affectionate fun at classic fairy tales in this richly illustrated picture book. Readers will meet a distinguished cast of characters who seem oddly familiar but somehow changed. Full color.
Author Notes
Jon Scieszka was born September 8, 1954 in Flint , Michigan. After he graduated from Culver Military Academy where he was a Lieutenant, he studied to be a doctor at Albion College. He changed career directions and attended Columbia University where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1980. Before he became a full time writer, Scieszka was a lifeguard, painted factories, houses, and apartments and also wrote for magazines. He taught elementary school in New York for ten years as a 1st grade assistant, a 2nd grade homeroom teacher, and a computer, math, science and history teacher in 3rd - 8th grade.
He decided to take off a year from teaching in order to work with Lane Smith, an illustrator, to develop ideas for children's books. His book, The Stinky Cheese Man received the 1994 Rhode Island Children's Book Award. Scieszka's Math Curse, illustrated by Lane Smith, was an American Library Association Notable Book in 1996; a Blue Ribbon Book from the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books in 1995; and a Publisher's Weekly Best Children's Book in 1995. The Stinky Cheese Man received Georgia's 1997 Children's Choice Award and Wisconsin's The Golden Archer Award. Math Curse received Maine's Student Book Award, The Texas Bluebonnet Award and New Hampshire's The Great Stone Face Book Award in 1997. He was appointed the first National Ambassador for Young People's Literature by the Library of Congress in 2008. In 2014 his title, Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Motor made The New York Times Best Seller List. Frank Einstein and the Electro-Finger made the list in 2015.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 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, RI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved