The Gruffalo [Import] [Hardcover]

Julia Donaldson (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Macmillan Children's Books
• ISBN-10: 1403900515
• ISBN-13: 978-1403900517
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (134 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,558,203 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Julia Donaldson is the author of many successful books for children, including the classic THE GRUFFALO, which has won the Smarties Prize and the Blue Peter Award for the Best Book to Read Aloud. THE GRUFFALO'S CHILD was one of the biggest best-sellers of 2004 and won WHS Children's Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. Julia has also written many children's plays and songs, and runs regular storytelling and drama workshops. She lives in Glasgow with her family.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Share it with your kids!, August 10, 2006

By 

Mike...M (Right here.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Gruffalo (Mass Market Paperback)

A review of the hardcover edition applies to the softcover as well:

The Gruffalo is a delightfully irreverent story about a mouse and an imaginary monster, sure to please grown-ups as well as children. This is a case where you CAN judge the book by its humorous cover, and you won't be disappointed. Axel Scheffler's brightly colored and too-silly-to-be-really-scary illustrations set the tone for this light-hearted romp through multiple layers of comic irony; and Julia Donaldson's marvelous doggerel perfectly realizes the mouse's sprightly character.

It's much more than great fun, though. The Gruffalo also has tremendous resonance with familiar elements of Western culture. This is a story that Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell all could love. It's a perfect little Hero's Journey: it's got "the deep dark wood," a confrontation with the Monster Within, and a victorious return to the ordinary world where a nut is good. Had this been a fable of Aesop, we could expect our hero to be eaten right in the middle, and we would be left with some such lesson as "Don't be too clever for your own good." Instead, our mythical mouse makes his Eternal Return bearing a subtle wisdom that echoes the teachings of the world's greatest mystics.

The very structure of the story is classic, reminiscent of the great repetitive folk tales, such as "The Three Billy Goats Gruff," "The Three Little Pigs," or "The Little Red Hen." The mouse's encounter with a dangerous predator is repeated with slight variation in the wording three times (yes, three times, as in three crows of a cock, three days in the belly of the fish, three temptations under a bo tree...) then, after a dramatic climax, the story works its way back with another set of three variations as the mouse retraces his steps on the path toward the real climax.

The Gruffalo's greatest fun for grown-ups comes from its heaps of irony. First, there's the expectation of an Aesopian fable. That expectation is thwarted by the clever mouse. Second are the characters of the animals: they're all wrong. The mouse is not meek and fearful; he's bold and confident, a real smart-aleck, in fact. Then the fierce predators turn out to be wimps. Not only that, these are the exact animals that always represent intelligence in Western folk literature -- the clever fox -- the wise owl -- the subtle snake. Here they are all outwitted by the littlest of animals. Third is the basic irony of the mouse's meeting with the gruffalo -- maybe the mouse is not so clever, after all. Fourth, the terrible monster...! Fifth, he went through all that for a nut. Sixth, that story was a profoundly archetypal tale in goofy rhyme, with cartoon pictures. Seventh, I actually wrote this review, and you actually read it. What's next? Am I going to tell you that Harvey Potter's Balloon Farm is a model for education reform? (well . . . yes!)

Finally, The Gruffalo really is a fun and loveable book. One of the best for sharing with your kids.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One Of The Best!, November 2, 2004

By 

A Kindergarten Teacher (Buffalo, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Gruffalo (Picture Books) (Hardcover)

I read this book to my kindergarten class and they LOVE it! The children act it out, sequence the story through pictures, journal about it and talk about it for months it is one of their favorites and mine too! I love reading it because they get so excited and it is so much fun to read over and over!

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding Book, April 27, 2004

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Gruffalo (Picture Books) (Hardcover)

Wonderful story of an imaginative mouse who while taking a walk through the woods makes up a story about a animal he calls a Gruffalo , he makes up this animal to protect himself from the various predators (fox, owl, snake ) that want to eat him .He succeeds in frightening away the animals ,but than he meets the animal of his imagination a Gruffalo. Now he has a bigger problem the Gruffalo wants to eat him, so he tells the Gruffalo to walk behind him through the wooods and see how afraid the animals are of him (the mouse that is ). The Gruffalo of course doesn't believe that the animals could possibly be afraid of a mouse so he walks behind the mouse , and when the animals of the woods see the Gruffalo behind the mouse they runaway in fright and the Gruffalo believes that the mouse was telling the truth and runs away from the mouse himself. Very enjoyable for both parent and child. Wonderfully illustrated, I highly recommend the Gruffalo