The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka

Hey, Story Seekers!

The Big Bad Wolf would like a word.

Apparently we've been telling this story wrong for years.

He didn't huff. He didn't puff.

He had a cold.

The houses falling down? Unfortunate accidents.

The pigs getting eaten?

Well.

They were already dead.

And you wouldn't waste perfectly good food, would you?

We're exploring The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs, the 1989 fractured fairy tale that hands the microphone to Alexander T. Wolf and lets him explain himself.

Readit has already reached a verdict.

"I don't trust him."

We haven't even heard his story.

"He's in jail."

Good point.

Let's hear him anyway.

Book Breakdown

Before we go anywhere, look at that cover.

It's a newspaper. The Daily Wolf.

And check the byline.

BY A. WOLF.

Underneath, in smaller type: as told to Jon Scieszka.

Scieszka isn't the author on his own cover. He's the guy who took dictation.

The entire joke is already running and you haven't opened it.

Now. Al's version.

He says this whole mess started with a birthday cake. For his granny.

Nice guy.

Unfortunately, he needed a cup of sugar. Also unfortunately, he had a terrible cold.

So Al walks over to his neighbor's house to borrow some.

The neighbor happens to be a pig. The house happens to be made of straw.

Al sneezes.

House falls down.

Pig is dead.

And now we reach the part of Al's defense where I begin raising one eyebrow.

He eats the pig.

According to Al, leaving a perfectly good dead pig lying there would have been wasteful.

Uh-huh.

Then he still needs that sugar. Next pig. Stick house. Another sneeze. Another collapsed house. Another dead pig.

Another meal.

You can see why the authorities eventually take an interest.

But Al keeps narrating like the victim of one enormous misunderstanding. By the time he reaches the third pig, the brick house, the police and the reporters, he's blaming his reputation and the news media for turning a sick wolf looking for sugar into the Big Bad Wolf.

That's the joke. Scieszka doesn't simply retell the story with the wolf as hero.

He gives us a narrator who wants us to believe him.

A little too badly.

And Lane Smith understood the assignment immediately. His wolf isn't a bouncing cartoon villain. He's neatly dressed. He wears glasses. He looks civilized. Reasonable.

Trustworthy, even.

Then you start noticing what's around him. The dark palette. The food. The pig imagery hiding in the corners. The newspaper-style pages.

Smith gives Al's defense a strange combination of respectability and suspicion. Al is telling you one thing while the book quietly asks whether you're buying it.

Much funnier than drawing a wolf with an EVIL sign over his head.

For teachers and librarians: Lexile AD570L · Fountas & Pinnell Q · ATOS 3.0 · 863 words · ages 5 to 8, grades K to 3. Viking, first published October 1, 1989. Thirty-two pages.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

I don't believe this wolf.

I enjoy him tremendously.

Those are different things, and the gap between them is where the whole book lives.

What Scieszka gets right is Al's logic. Every single piece has an explanation.

The sneeze explains the huffing and puffing.

The cold explains the sneeze.

The weak houses explain why they fell.

The dead pigs explain why he ate them.

His bad reputation explains why everybody assumed the worst.

See? Perfectly reasonable.

As long as you don't stand back and look at all of it at once.

That's where the book becomes useful without turning into a lesson wearing a necktie, because the kid gets to decide whether a narrator has earned their trust.

I'd stop along the way and ask.

Do you believe him?

Not at the end. During.

First pig? Maybe.

Second pig? Hmm.

By the third, the room will have opinions.

And don't tell them Al is an unreliable narrator. That's grown-up vocabulary doing a kid's job. Let the wolf talk. Kids know suspicious when they hear it.

There's another layer that has aged strangely well. Al blames the reporters for making the story more exciting than it was.

So now you've got a conversation about headlines, point of view, who's holding the microphone, and how the same event sounds different depending on who tells it.

Take that as far as the age of the room allows.

Or just enjoy a wolf insisting that two dead pigs were basically leftovers.

Both work.

For the read-aloud, Al needs a voice, and here's the trap: don't make him sound villainous. That gives the whole game away on page one.

Make him reasonable. A little wounded. Faintly offended that anybody would question this entirely innocent sequence of pig-related catastrophes.

That's where the funny is.

Readit's Review

Nope.

Still don't trust him.

The first house?

Okay. Maybe you sneezed.

The second house?

That is getting suspicious.

Then you ATE BOTH PIGS.

Al keeps explaining everything like we're supposed to say, "Ohhhh, now it makes sense."

IT DOES NOT.

Also, if you have a cold that can knock down a house, you need to stay home.

Do not go borrowing sugar.

Do not visit pigs.

Do not stand near buildings.

And why do you still need the sugar so badly after you already ate a whole pig?

Go home, Al.

I like the newspaper part because now everybody has a different story.

But if I were the reporter, my headline would be:

WOLF SAYS IT WAS SNEEZING. SURE.

What Others Think

Readers have had plenty of time to cross-examine Al. Goodreads shows 4.32 out of 5 from 197,148 ratings and more than 4,200 written reviews.

The best thing I found isn't from a parent. It's from a college professor.

Karen writes: "I was not your typical college professor. I did not give tests. My style was to provide interactive classroom activities with the students that would be self-teaching lessons."

She used this picture book with university students.

Think about that for a second. A thirty-two-page book about a wolf who wanted sugar, holding up as a teaching text for adults, because the thing it's actually teaching is how to weigh a source.

Tim gets at the same idea from the reader's side: "For the most part, stories take the hero's point of view. This may seem obvious... What of the villain's though?"

And Kimmy raises a point I have genuinely never considered in forty years of knowing this story: "I always thought they framed the wolf considering there were 3 of them and one of him."

Huh.

Jordan admits the thing a lot of kids feel and rarely say: "even as a child I always liked the big bad wolf better than those annoying" pigs.

And Anne reports the reaction you want from a nine-year-old finding it on a shelf: she "freaked out... because she didn't realize we owned it."

One honest note about age. This one skews older than most of what we review, and the reason is that the joke is entirely dependent on already knowing the original. A child who has never met the Three Little Pigs has no story to compare Al's version against, and without that comparison he's just a wolf talking.

Know the first version. Then the second one is funny.

Belly Laugh Scale

4 out of 5: Big-Time Belly Laughs

The joke isn't noise.

It's nerve.

Al stands there and explains two demolished houses and two eaten pigs as though he's clearing up a small paperwork problem.

The more reasonable he tries to sound, the funnier he gets.

Lane Smith helps because the pictures never scream the joke. They let Al keep making his case while quietly making us more suspicious.

Four out of five.

I'd like the record to show that Readit requested a five on the grounds that Al "ate the evidence."

Request noted. Denied.

Final Explorer Verdict

I'd hand The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs to kids around 5 to 8.

And I'd hand it to a classroom faster than that.

Not because it has a capital-M Message that needs extracting with educational pliers.

Because kids will argue about it.

Did Al do it? Was any part of it true? Did the newspapers make him look worse than he was? Can two people tell different versions of the same event without both versions being equally believable?

Now you've got point of view, evidence, bias and credibility.

All because a wolf claims he needed sugar.

And Lane Smith is essential to it. His pictures don't merely show what Al says happened. They build the world in which Al is trying to sell it to you.

That's the word I keep landing on.

Version.

Not truth. Version.

If your kid loves catching a supremely confident character in the act, that's the exact engine of Professor Nincompoop. A loud expert makes ridiculous claims, two kids start asking questions, and the whole thing comes apart.

Al says he's innocent.

Readit says he's guilty.

I'm still wondering whether Granny ever got her cake.

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit