The Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales

The title is a very honest one. These are indeed fairly stupid stories. Characters stroll from story to story demanding the reader's attention, print vanishes into the unseen depths beneath the bottom of the page, narratives are crudely truncated, shuffled, scrambled and downright trivialised. The illustrations, deranged collages of garish imagery, look like the victims of demented surgeons. This is, however, one of the best fiver's worth of literature you're likely to get hold of. Scieszka sabotages all the conventions of traditional tales and book layout, and from the wreckage constructs a ramshackle, Heath-Robinson joke and storytelling machine that most children will find fascinating.