Knuckleheads

by Michael Slack and Joan Holub

Book Overview

From Handsel and Gretel nibbling on a house made of finger food to Handerella trying to win over the handsome Finger Prints, Knuckleheads is hands down fun Earburt and Toeper give it two thumbs up The... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811855236
• ISBN13: 9780811855235
• Release Date: September 2008
• Publisher: Chronicle Books
• Length: 1 Pages
• Weight: 3.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 9.4" x 11.3"
• Age Range: 6 to 10 years
• Grade Range: Grades 1 to 5

Customer Reviews

Knuckleheads, puns for all

Oh, this book is funny. I love a good pun, and the word play in this crackerjack kids book is chock full of silliness and fun. And the jokes are not just in the text! The illustrations tell jokes too, and the diligent peruser of this book will find visually-based giggles on each page that he/she might have missed before. Knuckleheads is a collection of fractured fairy tales that features hands(and fingers and noses and toes-es) as the stars of four fables that are linked by a evil green hand-Witch, who makes her way though the book as part of her escape from justice(she was caught red-handed, trying to roast Handsel and Gretel). The Witch, who makes her debut with a brass knuckle and a house made of finger foods, then shows up in a footed disguise in Handerella. After her plans are tripped up for matching one of the step sisters with the Prince(Finger Prints-ha!), she then makes a short appearance in Thumbelina, and then gets her diva on as the Queen in Nose White. A bit of knowledge about the original fairy tales is helpful(my three year old was a bit lost with many of the jokes), so I would suggest this book for anyone over 5 years old. That said, my son DID think that the pictures were funny, and he liked the book overall, perhaps because I was reading it with my "funny book voice" and laughing at it myself. I am sure that comparisons to the The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales and Squids Will Be Squids will be made with Knuckleheads, and deservedly so in the best possible way: these books(and their authors/illustrators) do not write down to children. They create unique and challenging books that are witty and silly and wonderfully fun to read. Knuckleheads stands alone in how thoroughly the joke is maintained throughout the read: I don't think that there is a hand pun that is left unheralded in this book. Part of the fun is wondering how another pun can be squeezed in to the story. And it can, dear reader, handily.

Fairy Tales with a Twist

For those of you who love fairy tales and the ways people take them and twist them around have I found the book for you! Knuckleheads is a book of fairy tales in which the characters are hands, feet, thumbs and noses. It is by far one of the most amusing picture-book retellings of fairy tales that I have seen in a long time! We are treated to the tales of: "Handsel & Gretel," "Handerella," "Thumbilina," and "Nose White." The tales are quite condensed, and some of them are missing some major aspects of the story, like the parents in "Handsel & Gretel, but all-in-all the book is a lot of fun. The text itself is humorous and a bit slap-stick in nature, but when you combine that with the illustrations you have a hit on your hands! Parents will probably get a little bit more of the humor than the really young kids, but it's not at a level that is unattainable. I think this is one of those books, that, if a child loves it and reads it again and again, they will get more out of it with each reading. Also, make sure to read ALL of the text on the pages. A good example is in the "Handerella" story, where there's a sign that reads: How to be a wicked stepsister in three easy steps: 1. Step on others' feelings. 2. Step on others' toes. 3. Step on anyone who gets in your way." You may not get the humor by just reading that, but when you add in the fact that her stepsisters are feet (plus the word stepsister) you have comedic gold on your hands. I think kids will totally love the humor of this book! Notes on the Cover: Honestly, if I hadn't heard about this one I probably wouldn't have picked it up. The title is in red and in the very center of the cover. I find the title so distracting that the first time I looked at it I didn't even notice that the little designs in the four corners of the book had the titles and the characters of the fairy tales that are in the book. Also, the little hand-vine that surrounds the title is very interesting upon closer inspection, but I find the title itself to be the focus of my attention and it really looks like a book that boys would enjoy just by glancing at the title. (And I do think boys will like this book!)

: Two thumbs up? A hearty handshake? A round of applause? I can't stop!

Puns. Puns are hard. I think that it's safe to say that every adult has a kind of pun-limit. We can only take so many of them until we hit that limit and our groans turn from humored acknowledgments of cleverness to real moans of pain. Of course this limit is entirely reliant on the quality of the puns at hand, particularly when you're dealing with picture books. Now we turn our attention to "Knuckleheads" by Joan Holub, as illustrated by Michael Slack. As I read through the book I found my pun limit thwarted time and time again. The sheer weirdness of the concept combined with the four storylines . . . well, basically this is like nothing you've ever seen (let alone dreamed up) before. You can't deny it. If fairytales were performed entirely by sentient isolated body parts, this is certainly how their stories would go. Four stories, all held together by a single green-skinned witch. Four stories, all based on famous fairy tales, in which the characters have been replaced with hands, feet, noses, thumbs, and other extreme extremities. In the first tale "Handsel and Gretel" two troublemakers outwit an evil witch. The witch is caught, but escapes into the next story "Handerella" where she masquerades as the little hand's evil stepmother. Instead of a beautiful gown, Handerella goes to the ball in an evening glove with a ring (toe-pazz?) and when she runs away in the night the prince ("Finger Prints") tries to find the lady in the kingdom that will fit the ring. Foiled once more the witch briefly participates in Thumbelina (it's a short tale, haha) and then becomes the evil queen in "Nose White". And even when this story finishes, however, she's bound for other tales like "Paul Bunion" and "The Adventures of Tom Thumb" to wreck havoc everywhere. I would not have imagined the sheer amount of hand-based puns a single human brain is capable of producing. Mood rings, finger food, thumb wrestling, brass knuckles . . . basically if you can think of some kind of hand-based pun it's in here. After reading Handsel and Gretel I was convinced that Holub had done all she could, and maybe that was partly true. But about the time you come to the tale of "Handerella" and her evil foot-based stepsisters, that's when things go from merely weird to downright bizarre. Now the foot jokes come out as well (though there's certainly enough hand-based entertainment to go around too). And then when Snow White becomes Nose White... you get the picture. But somehow it actually works. I mean they're all pretty funny to read through and the stories hold together. For all its insane anarchistic look and feel, this is a competent series of fractured tales. Though obviously you'd have to hand it to a kid who already knew the stories already and would be able to get the jokes. The sheer amount of details in this book visually are also staggering. In fact, I had to start wondering at some point whether or not illustrator Michael Slack gave any s