The Iron Woman

The Iron Woman by Ted Hughes is a dark and beautifully written story for 7 year olds about a girl who watches a dying eel and then feels the ground start to shake.

Lucy is walking home across the marsh. She stops on the little bridge where she once saw an otter, the way she always does.

In the black water below there's an eel, and something is very wrong with it. It knots and unknots itself. It corkscrews in circles. It keeps pushing its head up into the air with its mouth open.

Lucy feels a twist in her middle watching it. She wants to scoop it up. She has no idea how to help.

Then the bridge rail jolts under her hand.

She runs, falls flat, and hears a long wailing cry coming out of the reeds behind her.

What is standing up out of the mud is the size of two or three elephants. It looks like a dinosaur hauling itself out of a tar pit, until it sits up, and then it looks horribly like a person.

A birdwatcher meets it on the road. He has just discovered that the bittern he's been photographing all day has been dead the whole time, sitting on cold eggs. He takes photographs while the giant picks up his car and beats it against the road like a rug.

Then it comes to Lucy's house in the dark and taps on her window with three snowdrops held between an enormous finger and thumb.

Hughes writes like the poet he was. You get the smell of the marsh, the heron scrambling up an invisible staircase, the exact sound of an eel's mouth opening. There's almost no dialogue for pages at a time and it doesn't need any.

Be ready for the animals. The suffering of creatures in the water is the whole point of this book and it is never softened. A poisoned eel writhing, a dead mother bird stiff on eggs that will never hatch, voles and grass snakes tipped out of the mud and squealing as they fall. Lucy has a proper nightmare too, and it's described in full.

For a child who can't bear animals being hurt, this will be a hard read and you should know that before it's open on their lap.

For a child who already gets furious about what people do to rivers, this book is furious with them and it gives that anger somewhere to go. It is on their side entirely.

It's a serious piece of writing as well. The sentences are long and rich, so it suits a reader who's happy to slow down, or an adult reading it aloud a chapter at a time.

For another book that takes an animal completely seriously, there's Pax. A boy is made to leave his tame fox at the edge of a wood, and half the story is told from the fox's side, waiting.