The Cucumber King

Just when you think you've read every possible children's book plot...you run across The Cucumber King. I've just finished another of Christine Nöstlinger's 1001 Children's Books You Must Read books, the innocuous-sounding (it's far from that) Fly Away Home, so I knew enough about Nöstlinger to expect an amazingly-astute (but not impossibly-so) narrator, some political themes, and some wonderfully real and snarky characters. Nothing in Fly Away Home led me to expect a Cucumber King, however; wherever did the idea of having a cucumber king joining a human family upstairs after being overthrown by his cucumber subjects come from? It's clever and fun and strange, everything I love in a children's story.