The Cat, the Dog, Little Red, the Exploding Eggs, the Wolf, and Grandma by Diane Fox (review)

“There was once a sweet little girl who lived with her father and mother in a pretty little cottage,” announces the stately type beginning this book, and the titular cat is very eager to finish the story of Little Red Riding Hood. The dog, however, assumes that Red’s cape means that she’s a superhero and her basket must be filled with exploding eggs, so the pooch peppers the cat with questions throughout much of the telling. The cat does manage to make it to the end of the story, getting carried away and scaring the dog just a little bit with axe-wielding enthusiasm. Dog just has one more question: “Is Grandma still in the closet?” Where most breaking-up-the-classic-story texts opt for boisterous chaos, this one tends toward a quieter but still amusing subversion; there’s never enough digression from the main story to detract from it, and the dog’s questions aren’t too far off from the kind asked by children during a readaloud. Illustrations also are pretty simple, with scrawled pencilly outlines, often only splashed in with gently faded color in small details, leaving plenty of white space for imaginations to fill in. This fractured fairy tale would work especially well as a more subdued counterpart to the energy of Stein’s Interrupting Chicken or Scieszka’s The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (BCCB 10/92).