Humpty Dumpty's hard-boiled brother tackles the mystery of this infamous fall. In a big gold trench coat and matching fedora, private eye Joe Dumpty makes a bold assertion--"Humpty Dumpty was pushed"--and sets out to crack the case, supported by police Chief (Mother) Goose. His droll investigation covers a rogue's gallery of nursery-rhyme characters. Miss Muffet proves a tough cookie; Joe finds a key piece of evidence under her tuffet. Other suspects include Goldilocks (who's house-sitting for the Three Bears and answers the door in pajamas and bedhead), a Zoot-suited Wolf, a skittish Chicken Little and the bickering Three Little Pigs. Ransom's execution of her delicious premise is scattershot, but with many more hits than misses, and her text is substantial, appropriate for her target school-age audience. Axelsen's watercolor-cum-pen-and-ink illustrations offer additional laughs and surprises. While done with a bit more polish and 'tude by Margie Palatini and Richard Egieski in 2001's The Web Files, this nursery-rhyme caper will please.

Clever wordplay marks Ransom's (What Do Your Parents Do? [When You're Not Home]) fast-paced, noir-styled offering. Detective Joe Dumpty unravels the real reason his brother, Humpty, took a spill, interviewing characters that hail from the pages of Mother Goose (she puts in an appearance, too). The puns, a little more subtle than in similar stories, are on target for the suggested audience, e.g., “I looked at my brother. He wasn't moving. Whoever did this was gonna fry!” Axelsen (the Piccolo and Annabelle series) provides plenty of humor with busy cartoon illustrations, many of them inset with boxed vignettes; Chicken Little and her offspring, for example, wear crash helmets and reside in a fortified bunker. The noir conventions add a layer of sophistication to the nursery-rhyme setting, ratcheting up the book's appeal for primary-grade readers.

When Humpty Dumpty took that great fall, his hard-boiled brother, Joe Dumpty, wasn't buying the accident angle. "Humpty Dumpty was pushed," and as a private investigator, Joe's determined to crack the case. Natty in trench coat and fedora with a dashing cleft chin, Joe gets sucked deeper and deeper into the mystery, grilling Mother Goose's entire company of miscreants, including Goldilocks and Chicken Little. "I've always liked mysteries but never realized how hard they are to write," says Jeanie Franz Ransom. "This being a picture book, I thought the plot would be straightforward, until a minor character, Little Miss Muffet, wrote herself into a major role. Suddenly, I was faced with more plot twists and turns than I'd ever imagined." It's a pleasurably cockamamie trail to the denouement (hint: "I'm Bad. It's my middle name"), enough to hold hopes for Joe's next investigation.

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m a huge egg fan, see. They can be real smooth at times, make you think they’re one thing, when they’re really another. I like that in an egg. Hard-boiled, sunny-side up, over-easy, scrambled, but my all time favorite is the Humpty-Dumpty kind, especially served up fresh in a Film Noir or Dragnet-style kind-of way.

Take the newly released What Really Happened To Humpty? by Joe Dumpty as told to Jeanie Franz Ransom. The tale, recounted tongue-in-cheek (can you say that for an egg story?) by Humpty’s hard-boiled detective brother Joe, opens like this:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.

Now if that hasn’t got you itchin’ (you’re not allergic to eggs, are you?) to find out more … This clever book simply cracked me up with its puns, plot and pictures. The mystery revolves around poor pushed Humpty, a pair of binoculars and a big wind. Readers’ appetites for a good, hearty romp around Mother Gooseland is whet by some well known personalities from childhood. The cast of possible culprits includes the Muffin Man, Old Mother Hubbard, Little Miss Muffet or Muffy, Spider, Goldie (as in Locks) and Chicken Little.

I really can’t tell much more without giving away all the good gags, but suffice it to say that its ending will leave readers satisfied. Kids will be happy that Humpty survives intact and his brother Joe, now vindicated for having solved the crime, can move on to new, more pressing business like helping Bo Peep find those missing sheep.

Mother Goose meets Raymond Chandler in this noir-ish romp through the classic egg story. Hard-boiled detective Joe Dumpty hopes to crack the case of his fallen brother--after all, maybe Humpty was pushed off that wall on what the detective calls "that awful, scrambled-up day." In the course of his investigation, he grills Chicken Little, that "tough cookie" Miss Muffet (who's hiding somewhere in her tuffet), the Big Bad Wolf and other familiar figures. If they ever make a movie of this one, we suggest Humpty Bogart as the detective.

When Humpty falls off the wall, his brother Joe, a detective in Mother Gooseland, is convinced that he was pushed. Thus begins the unraveling of the mystery of who did the dastardly deed. All of the characters use cell phones and some drive cars in this long and complicated tale. There are a lot of egg jokes, and wordplay abounds. In the end, Little Miss Muffet and the Big Bad Wolf go off to jail for their crime. Now Joe Dumpty has more work to do as the Dish just ran away with the Spoon and Bo Peep's sheep are roaming. The illustrations are done in watercolor, with pen and ink. The drawings are various sizes and often there are multiple frames per page. Pictures are detailed, and many contain speech balloons. This is a text-heavy story that will tickle the funny bone of readers old enough to get the jokes.

Hard-boiled detective Joe Dumpty’s ovoid body is encased in a ’40s-era belted brown trench coat topped with a fedora, and his clipped statements will remind older readers of TV’s Joe Friday. Here, cleft-chinned Joe recounts how he cracked one of the toughest mysteries in Mother Gooseland: the assault with intent to spill the yolky interior of his older brother, Humpty. Joe tells how he examined the crime scene before the ambulance arrived (pulled by all the king’s horses and filled with all the king’s men). He recovers some evidence from under Miss Muffet’s tuffet, interviews the shell-shocked Humpty in the hospital, and follows the trail of evidence to one very huffy Big Bad Wolf, dressed to kill in gangster pinstripes. This enchanting send-up of old-time detective stories will have older readers in stitches, while younger readers will get caught up in the clever recombination of fairy-tale characters. The illustrations, done in watercolor and pen and ink, are as filled with puns and crowded with humorous detail as the story—even the typeface looks like it was pounded out by an old Remington typewriter. This CSI: Mother Goose is a winner.

Humpty's fall off the wall was no accident. His younger brother, Detective Joe Dumpty, suspects that Humpty was pushed, and he sets out to prove it in this clever picture book.
Author Jeanie Franz Ransom sets her nursery rhyme mystery in Gooseland, home to the Three Pigs, the Three Bears, the Old Woman Who Lives in a Shoe and other fabled suspects … er, neighbors. Her tone recalls the clipped cop-speak of Jack Webb as Joe Friday in the old "Dragnet" TV show. The book is also full of puns and wordplay.
The police chief in this seaside village is Mother Goose. She's sure Humpty's fall was an accident, but she allows Joe to investigate. After seeing Humpty off in an ambulance wagon pulled by all the King's horses and all the King's men, he looks for clues around the wall. Under Miss Muffet's tuffet, he spots Humpty's binoculars. Other clues lurk in the text as the story develops (no spoiler hints here).
Adults and older children will giggle at Ransom's wordplay, starting with the subtitle "from the files of a hard-boiled detective." Humpty's the good egg in Chief Goose's eyes. She's calling the shots on this scrambled-up day when Humpty winds up feeling shell-shocked.
Pretty soon, the clues point to two culprits in a conspiracy that revolves around Humpty's binoculars and sweet muffins. Joe, however, has no time for praise. He's off to solve the case of a dish running off with a spoon.
Artist Stephen Axelsen mines his rich material with visual asides, such as the blind mice sipping coffee at a sidewalk café with Puss from "Puss 'n' Boots" at the next table. Using a colorful cartoon style, he squeezes Detective Joe into a tan trench coat and sets him up in a 1940s office with an old black phone and a manual typewriter. In a time-warp contrast, Joe walks to work with his espresso in a take-away cup, and Miss Muffet uses a cell phone to call 911 after Humpty falls.
Another cell found in the ashes at the Little Pigs' house lets Detective Joe crack the case.
Children who have yet to learn their nursery rhymes will enjoy the action in this humorous romp, but youngsters who know the nursery rhyme characters will relish this fresh tale from Gooseland.

What Really Happened to Humpty? is written by Joe Dumpty (as told to Jeanie Franz Ransom) and is illustrated by Stephen Axelsen and presents the ultimate crime case for little kids to solve.

Joe Dumpty, Humpty's younger brother,is definitely not the popular brother. Mother Goose much preferred Humpty, and thus built all the stories around him. When Humpty takes his infamous fall, the rumor on the street is that he was pushed! Joe just happens to be an investigator and sets out to solve the crime of who pushed Humpty off the wall!

A very cute concept, your kids will love that their beloved nursery rhyme might just have a little backstory going on. The characters are a lot of fun, with appearances by Little Miss Muffet, Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks, and others, this one is a lot of fun for a read aloud with the family.

Mother Gooseland ain't what it used to be, as we see in Jeanie Franz Ransom's What Really Happened to Humpty? by Joe Dumpty. Joe is a really hardboiled detective, in a trench coat and fedora hat that conceals his crew cut, and he's out to find the truth behind his brother Humpty's near-fatal collapse. Chief Mother Goose is ready to write it off as a mere accident, but Joe goes on his gut instinct and ferrets out the clues: a pair of binoculars, a cell phone, and a series of suspicious incidents that lead to a not-too-surprising conclusion. Stephen Axelsen's watercolor and pen illustrations depict a very modern Mother Gooseland where Chicken Little cowers in a barbed-wire enclosed bunker, the Old Woman leaves her children in a Day Care Center, and modern medical technology can put Humpty Dumpty together again. Grownups may groan at the puns, but the kids will enjoy this modern twist on the traditional nursery rhyme.

Picture book for preschoolers through second graders
*A smart egg as the main character
*Rating: What Really Happened to Humpty? is one of the cutest fractured fairy tale books I’ve seen in a long time.

Short, short summary: Joe Dumpty, Humpty Dumpty’s younger brother, thinks Humpty did not just fall off that wall–he was pushed. Joe convinces Mother Goose to let him investigate and find out what really happened to his brother. Was it Little Miss Muffet? “What is she hiding under her tuffet?” What about Chicken Little or the Spider? Or how about Goldie? “Was she cooking up trouble?” Joe tells his story of how he discovered what actually happened to his poor brother, Humpty Dumpty. Jeanie Franz Ransom writes a clever story, even including all the kings’ horses and all the kings’ men. Stephen Axelsen’s illustrations are funny and witty, too. Join Mother Goose’s story characters on a detective story like no other.

So, what do I do with this book?

1. One of the easiest things to do with What Really Happened to Humpty? is to follow the clues that Joe Dumpty finds and let students try to solve the mystery along with Joe. Can students guess who they think pushed Humpty, or do they agree with Mother Goose that it was all just an accident? Older students can write their guesses and opinions in reading response journals.

2. Compare and contrast other fractured fairy tales with Jeanie Franz Ransom’s Humpty Dumpty tale. Talk about the characteristics of fractured fairy tales and see how many of these characteristics What Really Happened to Humpty? has.

3. This book can also be used with social studies curriculums. It talks a lot about Neighborhood Watch programs. Many social studies curriculums include objectives about communities, so discussing the Neighborhood Watch program with students will help meet these objectives. Students can also interview their families and see if they have Neighborhood Watch programs in their own communities.

Joe Dumpty is as hard-boiled as they come, and he's just the egg to prove that his brother's fall was no accident. Younger readers will focus on the mystery and the offbeat take on nursery rhyme characters, while older readers will make a game out of finding the many puns in this story by St. Louis author Ransom.