With Professor Goose Debunks the Three Little Pigs, the second book in the Professor Goose Debunks Fairy Tales series, Paulette Bourgeois and Alex G. Griffiths take another rollicking deep dive into a classic kids' story. With narrator Professor Marie Curious Goose doing the scientific heavy lifting, all that's required of readers is a familiarity with the original fairy tale and a sense of humor.
The book begins with a fretful Professor Goose at a laptop: "Well, cook my goose--this is outrageous! My Great-Aunt Mother Goose never fact-checked the science in her stories. As a renowned and distinguished scientist, I feel obliged to correct any errors and omissions." As the story of the Three Little Pigs plays out, Professor Goose watches from the sidelines, often hiding somewhere in Griffiths's zippy digitally tweaked pen-and-ink art: behind a bale of straw, in a load of bricks, and so on. The professor editorializes from her perch within the story or in occasional Professor Goose's Fact Check sidebars. What does she think of, say, the three pigs' term "chinny-chin-chins" and the wolf's legendary huffing and puffing? "First of all," Professor Goose reports, "only humans have chins. And second, even if the wolf had superpower super-lungs, he couldn't blow a house in. You couldn't, either."
It should be noted that the good professor is mum on the scientific plausibility of a talking goose, but for the punning and piquing Professor Goose Debunks the Three Little Pigs, readers should be only too happy to suspend disbelief. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author