Who Pushed Humpty Dumpty?

Levinthal, D., & Nickle, J. (2012). Who pushed Humpty Dumpty?: and other notorious nursery tale mysteries. New York: Schwartz & Wade Books.

Summary:

"Five familiar fairytales get twisted into humorous noir detective stories in an extremely clever take on who pushed Humpty Dumpty and more. Early readers will have fun with this one." - Seira Wilson, Amazon Editor

Break-in at the Three Bears family home? It could only be one dame. Wicked witch gone missing from her candied cottage? Hansel and Gretel claim it was self-defense. Did Humpty Dumpty really just fall off that wall, or was he pushed? Here are five fairy-tale stories with a twist, all told from the point of view of a streetwise police officer called Binky, who just happens to be a toad in a suit and a fedora. When Snow White doesn't make it to the beauty pageant, Officer Binky is the first to find the apple core lying by her bed. When an awful giant mysteriously crashes to the ground, upsetting the whole town, Binky discovers exactly who is responsible. Author David Levinthal and illustrator John Nickle retell these classic stories in the style of a 1940s noir detective novel—for kids!

Age level appropriate for this book: Kindergarten-3^rd grade

Justification: Who Pushed Humpty Dumpty is a story about nursery rhymes from different perspectives. This book would be good for use with the Kentucky standard, RL 3.1. (Ask and answer questions, and make and support logical inferences to construct meaning from the text.) After reading the book, teachers could have their students become the detectives. They could ask their classmates questions and look for clues to determine the truth. This could be about something made up or it could be based off another book or tale. This would allow students to apply the knowledge they learned from Who Pushed Humpty Dumpty which gives them a deeper understanding of the meaning of the book. Students will love this book and there are many different activities that could go along with it.

Review:

In language reminiscent of old-time-radio detective stories, Officer Binky narrates a few of his cases, which will be very familiar to young readers.

A call from Mrs. Bear sends Binky to his first crime scene: eaten porridge, broken chair, rumpled bed. “It could only be one dame: Goldilocks! I nabbed her trying to make her getaway….They’ll feed her three meals a day where she’s going.” A missing-person report has Binky driving to the Deep Dark Woods to investigate a woodcutter and his two children. It doesn’t take long for him to determine it was self-defense. An omelet leads the diminutive frog cop to Humpty’s killer, while the crime lab helps him solve the case of the poisoning of a beautiful girl by a beauty-pageant judge. The final case is less a mystery than an investigation into the cause of an explosion/earthquake. Luckily, some golden eggs are the hard evidence Binky needs to get the lieutenant to believe what happened. The acrylic artwork suits the noir atmosphere, somber colors and tension-filled scenes alternating with humorous details that match the tongue-in-cheek text. The one quibble is that Nickle’s people are rather stiff, with oddly shaped heads and strange facial expressions. Still, there is humor to appeal to all ages here.

Levinthal’s children’s-book debut lacks the laugh-out-loud silliness that is Margie Palatini and Richard Egielski’s mashup The Web Files (2001), but this will find an audience. (Fractured fairy tales. 5-9)