Before embarking on this review, perhaps I should explain just how I, a thirty year-old old adult with no children, came to be reading this book in the first place. Well, the story goes like this (if you don't want to know, skip to the Review subheading.)

Picture the scene: my wife and I are walking down the road carrying some shopping home, when we pass by a yard sale in someone's front garden. "Oh, a yard sale", I think to myself, "I've never actually seen one of those before in real life". As we are about to pass by we are unexpectedly assailed by a wail from a young girl: "Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease buy something, we haven't sold aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanythiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing". Being of a somewhat kind and generous nature we stop and gaze upon the motley assortment of worn-out tat that the girls are trying to sell. (They are enterprising little blighters - they have advertised their sale on a nearby electricity box.) There is little or nothing of any real interest there but I do spy a couple of books. On closer inspection one of them is the book you are about to read a review of. "Oh, Roald Dahl", I think, "I really enjoyed his books when I was a child". Seeing my interest one of the young entrepreneurs lowers her asking price with amazing speed from 50p to 25p. Not wishing to curb such enthusiasm (albeit perhaps fiscal impropriety), I agree. Thereupon I am presented with a much-travelled version of Esio Trot for the princely sum of a quarter of one pound sterling.

Shortly after this we hear one of the girls say, "but you forgot that thing that you sold for a pound earlier…" This girl was very quickly shushed by the little con merchant who had hailed us earlier. She beamed at us, embarrassed but mostly unabashed. A born Arthur Daley, that one. They would not admit to the covert operation that the money raised would be put to.

I can just imagine the next passersby and what they would hear… a plaintive "Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease buy something, we haven't sold aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanythiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing"…

And that, dear reader, is the entire sordid affair.



Review (Finally…)

Esio Trot is the story of Mr Hoppy. Mr Hoppy is a very shy man who loves flowers and his downstairs neighbours. His flowers possibly know of his great affection for them, but Mrs Silvers in the flat below him certainly doesn't. They exchange pleasantries every day from their balconies, but that's as far as it gets. Oh if only Mr Hoppy could find a way to break through his shyness and become Mrs Silver's hero…

Alas and alak, Mrs Silver's love is directed towards something else - a small tortoise named Alfie. However she is worried about Alfie because she thinks he is too small - in fact she won't let him watch TV in case he sees the giant tortoises in other countries and becomes insanely jealous (good thinking, huh?!?). Mr Hoppy sometimes wishes he were a tortoise that she might love him. Then he has an idea… what if he can make Alfie bigger, and thus win Mrs Silver's heart? A grand scheme is hatched in his mind, and he gets to work on a plan involving 140 tortoises of various sizes and a tortoise catcher…

"Esio Trot" is, as some readers may already have noticed, "Tortoise" backwards. This is because tortoises don't read forwards (hadn't you noticed?). This forms a large part of the story - but telling you that won't spoil your enjoyment of the book.. Obviously this is aimed at young children (probably about 4-8, I would have thought), but I enjoyed it as a complete change from the norm (having just finished an international espionage thriller immediately before reading this!) and as a major trip down memory lane. I remember quite a few Roald Dahl books from my childhood - primarily The BFG & James and the Giant Peach - and remember these with great fondness. So the nostalgia factor was pretty high, and it was quite a bizarre thing for me to read an entire book in about 20 minutes (being a fairly slow reader and usually tending to like long books). The story is obviously simple but told with the creativeness that Dahl was famous for and humour that even young children would enjoy.

The boo is also illustrated by Quentin Blake. Dahl and Blake were one of the most famous Author-Illustrator teams there have ever been and Blake's deceptively simple, immediately eye-catching style complements Dahl's story perfectly. The images somehow manage to combine the "just thrown together" and "precisely crafted" methods into an homogenous whole.

Before the story itself there is a small intro about why tortoises are no longer imported into Britain (the government put a stop to it because of the appalling conditions the tortoises were kept in while in transit, with many of them dying as a result before they reached these shores), and after it there is an even shorter biography of Roald Dahl (sadly nothing about Quentin Blake).

For more information see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Dahl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Blake

The book has a happy ending (for all the characters) and is sure to delight any child who reads it. I'm giving it 5 stars as I'm sure the target audience will love it, but as a (rather unexpected) step back in time I greatly enjoyed it for what it was, too.




Links


Because this book was by Welsh author Dahl and English cartoonist Blake, I'm entering this into Barbara (ifif1938)'s Write Off of all things British and French, commemorating her 500th review.


As it's also my first review of a book designed for this young a reader, I'm also putting it into my own Challenge Yourself 2007 Write Off.


Recommended: Yes