Giant Jim and the Hurricane

Jeremy Strong's Giant Jim and the Hurricane is a story for 8 year olds about a whole town deciding to arrest a giant before anybody asks what he is like.

What happens

Constable Dunstable wakes at half past six to a peculiar noise. He pulls back the curtain and there is an enormous face looking in at him, with a ginger beard as big as a forest.

He does what any of us would do. He runs out of his own front door, straight between the giant's legs, and keeps going. In his pyjamas.

Within minutes half the town is out in pyjamas and nightdresses, shouting at each other. We shall all be squashed! We shall all be squished!

Jim is as tall as four houses stacked on top of each other. He is holding a giant saucepan in one hand and a giant wicker basket in the other, and strapped to his back is a giant saxophone.

Mrs Goodbody wants him arrested at once. Constable Dunstable looks a long way up at that ginger head and decides he had better fetch his uniform, his handcuffs and his Giant-Spotter's Handbook first. It makes him feel braver to have the whole town marching behind him.

One person asks the sensible question. Poppy Palmer, the farmer's daughter, wants to know what is actually wrong with giants. Nobody listens to her. She thinks Jim looks rather nice.

She is right, of course. Jim isn't after anybody. He eats omelettes, he likes his music, and what he really wants is somewhere to live. The trouble is that he is very big and not very careful, and a giant who plays the saxophone at full blast and sits down in the wrong place does an enormous amount of damage without meaning any of it.

This is a great read-aloud, because the names are doing half the work and the whole thing wants to be said in silly voices. Dunstable. Sniffling. Goodbody. The rhythm is built for it, with things going wrong three at a time and everybody blaming the giant.

A gentle flag for softer readers. The town turns on Jim properly. They throw eggs at him and they send him away, and he hasn't done anything on purpose. Then a hurricane arrives and they need him. Children who mind about unfairness will mind quite hard in the middle bit, so it is worth saying out loud that it comes right.

What to read next

Sigurd the Viking pulls much the same trick in There's a Viking in My Bed. He goes overboard from his longboat, washes up in a modern seaside town, ends up in a hotel and has a go at fitting in.