AmySea

I had a lot of fun reading What Really Happened to Humpty? to the kids. I like hard-boiled detective stories, as a kid I adored nursery rhymes and Mother Goose tales, and so the combination of the hard-boiled detective and nursery rhyme characters was just great! The hard-boiled/noir voice was nicely done in this book, in fact, I think that's what kept the kids hanging on to every word in this tale. When I read the story to the kids I made sure to do my best Sam Spade, and that was lots of fun.

I didn't think my nephew would get this story, because he doesn't really know the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme, so I kind of vacillated between checking this book out and not doing so. As it turned out, it did not matter in the least that he wasn't familiar with this nursery rhyme, because this story was so well done that he was able to just enjoy the book on its own.

My niece, who is often shockingly slow to unravel a whodunit, had this mystery figured out almost immediately! This stunned me, because I completely missed the clues when I read this to myself, so I thought this was sufficiently subtle to keep the kids in the dark until the end. What I failed to take into account is that her brain is a lot newer, and a lot more nimble than mine! This was a fun, well-done mystery story, just chock-full of chances to let yourself go and do lots of different voices.