What Really Happened to Humpty?

December 22, 2008
Clever wordplay marks Ransom's (What Do Your Parents Do?
) fast-paced, noir-styled offering. Detective Joe Dumpty unravels the real reason his brother, Humpty, took a spill, interviewing characters that hail from the pages of Mother Goose (she puts in an appearance, too). The puns, a little more subtle than in similar stories, are on target for the suggested audience, e.g., “I looked at my brother. He wasn't moving. Whoever did this was gonna fry!” Axelsen (the Piccolo and Annabelle series) provides plenty of humor with busy cartoon illustrations, many of them inset with boxed vignettes; Chicken Little and her offspring, for example, wear crash helmets and reside in a fortified bunker. The noir conventions add a layer of sophistication to the nursery-rhyme setting, ratcheting up the book's appeal for primary-grade readers. Ages 6–9.

May 1, 2009
Gr 1-4-When Humpty falls off the wall, his brother Joe, a detective in Mother Gooseland, is convinced that he was pushed. Thus begins the unraveling of the mystery of who did the dastardly deed. All of the characters use cell phones and some drive cars in this long and complicated tale. There are a lot of egg jokes, and wordplay abounds. In the end, Little Miss Muffet and the Big Bad Wolf go off to jail for their crime. Now Joe Dumpty has more work to do as the Dish just ran away with the Spoon and Bo Peep's sheep are roaming. The illustrations are done in watercolor, with pen and ink. The drawings are various sizes and often there are multiple frames per page. Pictures are detailed, and many contain speech balloons. This is a text-heavy story that will tickle the funny bone of readers old enough to get the jokes."Ieva Bates, Ann Arbor District Library, MI"

Copyright 2009 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2009
Grades 1-4 *Starred Review* Hard-boiled detective Joe Dumptys ovoid body is encased in a 40s-era belted brown trench coat topped with a fedora, and his clipped statements will remind older readers of TVs Joe Friday. Here, cleft-chinned Joe recounts how he cracked one of the toughest mysteries in Mother Gooseland: the assault with intent to spill the yolky interior of his older brother, Humpty. Joe tells how he examined the crime scene before the ambulance arrived (pulled by all the kings horses and filled with all the kings men). He recovers some evidence from under Miss Muffets tuffet, interviews the shell-shocked Humpty in the hospital, and follows the trail of evidence to one very huffy Big Bad Wolf, dressed to kill in gangster pinstripes. This enchanting send-up of old-time detective stories will have older readers in stitches, while younger readers will get caught up inthe clever recombination of fairy-tale characters. The illustrations, done in watercolor and pen and ink, are as filled with puns and crowded with humorous detailas the storyeven the typeface looks likeit waspounded out by an old Remington typewriter. This CSI: Mother Goose is a winner.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)

October 19, 2020
A classic sibling debate sets the stage for this effective, child-led exploration of measurement methods. After Lia and Luís visit their family’s store to get their favorite Brazilian snacks, they wonder: is Luís’s one bag of tapioca biscuits “more” than Lia’s two chicken croquettes? In text sprinkled with Portuguese words (a glossary with a pronunciation guide is included at the end), the two children go back and forth, counting, comparing, and measuring: “She has two croquettes. Luís has only one bag of biscuits. Maybe Lia does have more.// Or maybe not... Luís has... 98, 99, 100 biscuits.” Eventually, Lia discovers who has more by weight and finds a way for each child to have an equal amount. Medeiros’s cheery, colorful digital illustrations capture the children’s frustration, concentration, and joy. Includes four additional adult-led activities to encourage children to think more about measurement and comparison. Ages 3–6.