Big Bad Wolf Investigates Fairy Tales: Fact-checking your favourite stories with SCIENCE!

*A Waterstone's Best Book of 2024*
*A BookTrust Great New Book of 2024-2025*
*Longlisted for the UKLA book awards 2025*
*Shortlisted for Peters Children's Book of the Year: Non-Fiction 2025*

　　Join the Big Bad Wolf as he debunks your favourite fairy tales with SCIENCE! Written by the hilarious Catherine Cawthorne and illustrated by award-winning Sara Ogilvie.

　　Did a princess really feel a tiny pea through a mountain of mattresses? And could a pumpkin actually turn into a carriage to carry Cinderella to the ball? Of course not! It's all a load of fairytale NONSENSE! Or is it . . . ? The Big Bad Wolf is on a mission to find the truth behind these tales, and clear his name in the process.

　　Combining STEM topics with classic stories children know and love, this hilarious non-fiction picture book is perfect for inquisitive children always asking big questions!

Review

　　This book is laugh out loud hilarious and overflowing with super cool science facts - I will never think of Cinderella's feet in quite the same way again! ― Kate Pankhurst, author and illustrator of the FANTASTICALLY GREAT WOMEN series

　　Cleverly introducing basics of scientific investigation, the book analyses fairy tales to ask if it really is possible for a wolf to blow down a straw house, for a gingerbread house to survive outside or whether big ears are all the better to hear you with? There are even experiments to try at home. Great fun from age four ― Daily Mail

Catherine Cawthorne writes books which blend fact and fiction together. Her first love has always been books, and some of her earliest memories are reading fairy tales with her dad. She spent most of her childhood either up a tree, reading, or forming secret societies in her best friend's shed. Catherine is also a keen scientist - she has an MSc in Human Communication Science and worked for many years as a Speech and Language Therapist before starting her career as an author.

Sara Ogilvie is an award-winning illustrator and printmaker, who has illustrated many bestselling and much-loved children's books, including The Detective Dog and The Hospital Dog by Julia Donaldson, and Dogs Don't Do Ballet by Anna Kemp. Born and bred in Edinburgh, she now lives with her family in Newcastle upon Tyne.