By David Ezra Stein
A little red chicken keeps jumping into her bedtime stories to save the characters, and completely wrecks the ending every time.
It's bedtime, and Papa says he'll read the little red chicken a story if she promises not to interrupt. She promises. But the second Hansel and Gretel get near the witch, she cannot help herself, she leaps right into the page shouting 'DON'T GO IN! SHE'S A WITCH!' and the story is over. Same with Little Red Riding Hood. Same with Chicken Little. Poor Papa gives up and asks her to tell HIM a story instead, and then a lovely thing happens: she's so warm and safe she falls asleep mid-sentence, and it's Papa who's left wide awake.
It's a Caldecott Honor book, and the joke lands because every child has been the little chicken who cannot sit still through a story. The pictures switch between the cozy, sketchy real world and bright fairy-tale pages that the chicken literally bursts into, so a pre-reader can follow the gag by looking. It's short, it's funny, and it turns bedtime itself into the happy ending, which makes it a lovely last book of the night.