Fairy Tales are Flipped, Twisted and Blown Up in The Stinky Cheese Man
Submitted by Raven Snook on
Does anyone do fairy tales straight anymore? I don't think so—and that's a good thing. Even Disney threw out the old helpless princess saved by the handsome price routine over a decade ago. Still, no one has quite the same twisted take on childhood classics as author Jon Scieszka. He doesn't just reinvent fairy tales, he blows them to bits. In his world, the Ugly Duckling really is an ugly duckling, and she's totally okay with that, thank you very much.
Now Atlantic for Kids—the family wing of the decidedly grown-up Atlantic Theater Company—is bringing the ridiculous stories in Scieszka's 1992 book The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales to life and they are, as advertised, gleefully stupid. But they're also funny, silly, kooky and surprising and, best of all, the moral of the story is that there doesn't need to be one.