The Three Pigs
David Wiesner
Clarion Books, 2001
From the dust jacket, “Three pigs…Straw, sticks, bricks…Huffs and puffs…You probably know the rest. It’s an old story, and every time someone tells it the same thing happens. But who says it’s supposed to? Who’s in charge of this story? Who gets to decide? Has anyone asked the pigs? No? Well, it’s about time someone did.
“Here, thanks to David Wiesner, is the answer.”
I don’t know if David Wiesner ever read Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, or if Jasper Fforde read Wiesner’s books? Wiesner has that same off-the-wall, so-far-out-of-the-box imagination that it just blows your mind. In case you don’t remember, Fforde’s Thursday Next series is all about an alternate England where books and all their characters have a life & world of their own inside Book World. Just like Fforde’s characters can go from book to book, Wiesner’s pigs go from story to story, picking up friends along the way before they finally settle back in their own story. Loved the concept, loved the illustrations, loved these three pigs. When you read it, be sure to keep an eye on the wolf. He’s just going along with the story but some of the looks on his face are priceless. He can’t figure out what’s going on around him and even though the narrator says he ate the pig, he can’t find a pig to eat! Too funny. Seriously, too-too funny!
Rating 5 out of 5 paws – I reviewed this book several years ago but I finally got my own copy at a library book sale and thought it so special, I’d review it again!!
Reviewer: 
Simon
There is so much detail in the photos that I lingered on each page just to see what I had not seen before.
Then one day he comes across a new toy – which just happens to be a flying saucer filled with itty-bitty green men!
Another Caledecott Medal winner Tuesday is about the mystery that takes place every Tuesday evening, around 8 o’clock. On this Tuesday, the sun has set over a pond and hundreds of frogs climb sitting on lily pads rise into the air and sail over a sleeping town. This is a surprise to their fellow pond dwellers (turtles and fish) as well as to roosting birds. As they fly by the houses in town, they peek in the windows to see what humans are doing. They finally end up at the house of an elderly woman who has fallen asleep in front of the television and stop to watch a late night show.
Around 4 o’clock in the morning the frogs get chased by a dog but then turned around and chase the dog! At sunrise, the magic ends, they fall back to earth and have to hop their way back to their pond. The book ends with the magic touching a different animal on the following Tuesday.
In the midst of the fog the boy meets a very friendly cloud and they are immediate best friends. The cloud takes the young boy to Sector 7 where all the clouds go to get their shape orders for the day. As it happens the boy can draw very well and the clouds start coming to him because they’re bored with the same old cloud shape. So he draws them different shapes to take, primarily creatures from the ocean, and they start changing into giant fish and other sea creatures. 
The people in charge of ordering the cloud shapes totally freak out and stop the clouds from heading out to the skies in their weird shapes and they send the boy back to the Empire State Building. On the way home he looks skyward from the school bus and sees fish shaped clouds in the sky.
As the story opens we find the boy has fallen asleep while reading and we get to peek into his dreams. In his dream he meets a chess board come to life with a real king and queen, bishops, and knights. They take him across the chessboard land into a castle that may in fact be a dragon. He meets the dragon in forest and then comes out of a book (with other chess board characters) into building that turns into rocky outcrops and the chess board people are now in miniature (kind of like Gulliver and the Lilliputians). 
Then he travels through the rocky outcrops on the back of a pig toward a city made of maps. Then back to the rocky outcrops which turn into croissants where he is blown by a windstorm onto a leaf that turns into a swan that flies over a chessboard sea. The swans take him back to his bed. When he wakes in the morning we see all the things around his bed that influenced his dream.
Library of Cats 