This winner of The Caldecott Medal is a creative - and hilarious - new way of telling an old story about three pigs and a wolf. The pictures are the most surprising element of the book; they display great dexterity as they range page-to-page from simple full-color cartoons, to outlines with no color, to highly detailed pictures. The story beings as expected, with the wolf blowing down the first pig's straw house, but then takes a whole new turn when the pig is 'blown right out of the story', falling out of the picture panel and appearing to be in a whole new reality. Dialogue bubbles help show the reader what is going on, as the pig seems to immediately understand. The wolf remains in the panels, utterly confused. As soon as he's out of the picture panel, the pig suddenly has much more detail and his color changes slightly. He helps the other two pigs escape from the wolf in the same manner, and they spend the rest of the book exploring other fairly tales, and collecting characters from those to join them in the new reality they've found.
This unique presentation challenges your child to think differently about characters in the story, as it is rare that the characters acknowledge the fact that they are 'stuck in a story'. Plentiful humor will entertain readers, like when the three pigs decide to fold the picture of the wolf into a paper airplane and ride it around for fun. The next few pages have no words and just show them flying around, using an unusual amount of white space, which also creates visual depth. Once off of the plane, one pig interacts with readers when he appears to be looking out of the page directly at the reader (as if looking into a TV camera) and says, "I think...someone's out there." This is another creative play on depth from the illustrator. Your child will very likely recognize the other nursery rhymes and tales that the pigs decide to visit, so it will be fun to name those and try to guess why those may have been selected.
Five-year-old Molly said this was the "coolest book" she's ever read. I asked what her favorite part was, and Molly said it was seeing all the different ways the pigs looked when they jumped into (or out of) the different stories. Molly wanted me to read this three times in a row and was obviously thinking hard. Finally, she asked, "Are we in a story too?"
--Audra