Read Fantastic Mr Fox free in the Little Reads app.
Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox is a short, fast, gleefully unfair story for 7 year olds about a thief you cannot help cheering for.
It begins with the three farmers, and Dahl clearly enjoyed himself enormously.
Boggis keeps thousands of chickens and eats three boiled chickens smothered with dumplings for breakfast, lunch and supper. Bunce keeps ducks and geese and lives on doughnuts stuffed with mashed goose liver, which gives him a tummy ache and a beastly temper. Bean keeps turkeys in an apple orchard, never eats a thing, drinks gallons of cider and is the cleverest of the three.
The local children have a rhyme about them. Read it out loud. It is impossible not to.
Up on the hill, under a huge tree, Mr Fox lives in a hole with Mrs Fox and their four Small Foxes. Every evening he asks her what she fancies. A plump chicken? A duck? A nice turkey? Then he trots down into the valley and helps himself.
He has never been caught, because he always walks into the wind so he can smell a farmer waiting in the dark. He can even tell which one it is. Boggis smells of rotten chicken skins. Bunce reeks of goose livers. Bean gives off cider fumes.
And then one night the three of them work it out and wait right outside his hole, with the wind blowing the wrong way.
The tension in that scene is remarkable for a book this short. Mr Fox creeps out an inch at a time, sniffing. He hears something. He decides it was a mouse. He comes further out. And then a glint of moonlight catches on a gun barrel.
It's worth knowing how that goes, because it is not gentle. They shoot, and Mr Fox loses his tail. The book describes what is left of it on the ground. Then the farmers fetch shovels and start digging out the hole with the whole family down there. Earlier on, one of them says he would like to rip the fox's guts out.
If your child worries about animals being hurt, that is a lot to take in the first few chapters, and it is not a passing mention. If they like a story where the clever underdog is properly up against it, it is exactly the right kind of scary.
The chapters are short and the whole thing is over quickly, which makes it a brilliant one to read aloud.
Dahl does the same trick again in Danny the Champion of the World, where a boy and his dad take on a rich, horrible landowner who guards his birds jealously, and the plan they come up with is even more outrageous.
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