Starred Review ALA Booklist (Tue Sep 01 00:00:00 CDT 1992)

Starred Review Whatever Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith coproduce usually spells a raucous time for everyone (see interview on opposite page), and this book's no different. It's a continuation of the fairy tale fracturing the pair undertook in The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, going that story nine better. Here are 10 complete stories! and 25 lavish paintings! that purposefully wreak havoc with such familiar nursery tales as Little Red Riding Hood, The Princess and the Pea, and Jack and the Beanstalk. The picture-book set will probably recognize the stories enough to know that what's going on isn't what's supposed to happen. But The Stinky Cheese Man isn't a book for little ones. It will take older children (that's teens along with 10s) to follow the disordered story lines and appreciate the narrative's dry wit, wordplay, and wacky, sophomoric jokes. There's more than a touch of black humor, too--Jack's giant eats the Little Red Hen as the book closes, and the Ugly Duckling never turns into a gorgeous swan. Smith's New Wave art is an intricate part of the whole, extending as well as reinforcing the narrative; the pictures are every bit as comically insolent and deliberately clever as the words, with Smith's dark palette giving them a moody feeling. An illustration sure to elicit school-yard belly laughs pictures the book's title character (whose head is an odiferous wheel of cheese) causing flowers to wilt, skunks to faint, and children to run screaming for home. But the high jinks go beyond plot and picture. Scieszka and Smith also play around with book design: type sizes vary from minute to majestic; one page is totally blank (this greatly upsets the Little Red Hen), while several others are filled with yellow smell squiggles. And there are other little surprises, some of which seem aimed more at adults than at kids: not often, for example, will you find such a rhetorical question as Who is this ISBN guy? or discover that book illustrations have been done in oil and vinegar. Every part of the book bears the loving, goofy stamp of its creators, and while their humor won't appeal to everyone, their endeavors will still attract a hefty following of readers--from 9 to 99. For fractured fairy tales of a different kind, see Brooke's Untold Tales.

Horn Book (Thu Aug 01 00:00:00 CDT 2002)

A new dust jacket features a full-page headshot of the Stinky Man himself on the front and a smooth sales pitch from Jack on the back. Libraries will be disappointed to miss out on the double-sided jacket, the inside of which contains the Long-Lost Fairly Stupid Tale "The Boy Who Cried Cow Patty" along with some obligatory squawking from the Little Red Hen about this "Special Ten Year Anniversary Edition."

Kirkus Reviews

From the front jacket copy (...56 action-packed pages, 75% more than those old 32-page `Brand-X' books'') to the Little Red Hen's back-cover diatribe (Who is this ISBN guy?''), the parodic humor here runs riot. The insistent Hen is already squawking her tale at Jack—officious narrator, MC, and sometime participant—before a page labeled Title Page'' in 192 point type; the dedication is upside down, Jack's introduction carries a Surgeon General's warning, and the table of contents turns up late—after a story in which it plays an unprecedented role, then gets a jolt that knocks one tale off the page and, apparently, right out of the book. The brief, colloquially told, thoroughly revised tales are in the same comic spirit: no one wants to eat the Stinky Cheese Man, unlike the Gingerbread Boy; a lovestruck prince puts a bowling ball under his princess's 100 mattresses;and much, much more!'' All of this is fairly amusing, but what's most unusual is the innovative play with typography (a repetitive story gets smaller and smaller like an eye test, and words and letters are distorted in various other ways) and Smith's wondrously bizarre and expressive art (``The illustrations are rendered in oil and vinegar,'' states the colophon). Irrepressibly zany fun. (Fiction/Picture book. 5+)"

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Grade-school irreverence abounds in this compendium of (extremely brief) fractured fairy tales, which might well be subtitled All Things Gross and Giddy.'' With a relentless application of the sarcasm that tickled readers of The True Story of the Three Little Pigs , Scieszka and Smith skewer a host of juvenile favorites: Little Red Running Shorts beats the wolf to grandmother's house; the Really Ugly Duckling matures into a Really Ugly Duck; Cinderumpelstiltskin isa girl who really blew it.'' Text and art work together for maximum comic impact--varying styles and sizes of type add to the illustrations' chaos, as when Chicken Licken discovers that the Table of Contents, and not the sky, is falling. Smith's art, in fact, expands upon his previous waggery to include increased interplay between characters, and even more of his intricate detail work. The collaborators' hijinks are evident in every aspect of the book, from endpapers to copyright notice. However, the zaniness and deadpan delivery that have distinguished their previous work may strike some as overdone here. This book's tone is often frenzied; its rather specialized humor, delivered with the rapid-fire pacing of a string of one-liners, at times seems almost mean-spirited. Ages 5-up. (Oct.)

School Library Journal

Gr 2-6-- Scieszka and Smith, the daring duo responsible for revealing The True Story of the Three Little Pigs (Viking, 1989), return here with nine new exposes, all narrated by the ubiquitous Jack (of Beanstalk fame). Unlike the detailed retelling of the pigs' tale, most of these stories are shortened, one-joke versions that often trade their traditional morals for hilarity. The Stinky Cheese Man'' is an odoriferous cousin to the gingerbread boy; when he runs away, nobody wants to run after him.The Other Frog Prince'' wheedles a kiss only to reveal that he is just a tricky frog (as the princess wipes the frog slime off her lips); the Little Red Hen wanders frantically in and out of the book squawking about her wheat, her bread, her story, until she is finally (and permanently) squelched by Jack's giant. The broad satire extends even to book design, with a blurb that proclaims ``NEW! IMPROVED! FUNNY! GOOD! BUY! NOW!'' and a skewed table of contents crashing down on Chicken Licken and company several pages after they proclaim that the sky is falling. The illustrations are similar in style and mood to those in the earlier book, with the addition of more abstraction plus collage in some areas. The typeface, text size, and placement varies to become a vital part of the illustrations for some of the tales. Clearly, it is necessary to be familiar with the original folktales to understand the humor of these versions. Those in the know will laugh out loud. --Susan L. Rogers, Chestnut Hill Academy, PA