Esio Trot

trumang - Mr. Hoppy is in love with the lady that lives on the floor below him named Mrs. Silver, but Mrs. Silver is in love with her tortoise named Alfie. Mrs. Silver wants Alfie to grow bigger. Mr. Hoppy is too embarrassed to tell Mrs. Silver that he loves her. He buys a bunch of tortoises from the pet shop and has them at his house. He is an engineer and works in a bus garage. He makes a tortoise catcher there that has two claws, a sting, and a handle. When you pull the handle, the claws close and catch the tortoise. He sends Mrs. Silver a letter that he says is in tortoise language (just regular words spelled backwards) and he tells her to read this to Alfie every day. When she is at work, he grabs Alfie and replaces him with a bigger tortoise. He does this once a week and keeps replacing the old tortoise with a bigger one. Mrs. Silver starts yelling one day and said that Alfie got so big that he doesn't fit in his little house anymore. Mr. Hoppy gives her a new poem to read to the tortoise to help it get smaller. She says the poem before she goes to work each day, and then Mr. Hoppy switches the tortoise out with a smaller one. Mrs. Silver calls him down to show him the tortoise fits in its house again. Mr. Hoppy invites Mrs. Silver in to his house for a cup of tea. Then he returns all the tortoises back to the pet shop. Mr. Hoppy and Mrs. Silver end up getting married! At the very end of the book, the real tortorise Alfie got sold to someone else, but Mrs. Silver never noticed. I thought that Mr. Hoppy's tortoise catcher was really cool and I liked how he got Mrs. Silver to notice him. This book got me interested in creating an invention of my own!

October 1, 1990
This celebrated, splendidly matched author-illustrator team here present a 64-page love story that is equally sweet and silly. For years, Mr. Hoppy has leaned over his balcony rail to gaze longingly at Mrs. Silver, who lives one floor below him. But all of her attention and affection is showered upon her pet tortoise, Alfie. Although the creature seems content, his devoted owner is concerned because he has gained a mere three ounces in the 11 years she has owned him. When the distressed Mrs. Silver tells her neighbor that she will be his ``slave for life'' if he can find a way to make Alfie grow, the determined Mr. Hoppy devises an elaborate scheme to make her think the tortoise is growing. (Since tortoises, according to Mr. Hoppy, are backward creatures that ``can only understand words that are written backwards,'' his exhortation to the pet begins ``Esio Trot''--which is ``tortoise'' reversed.) It is a happy Hoppy who gets all the credit--and Mrs. Silver's hand. Adults and older children will appreciate Dahl's superior storytelling skills, and will chuckle at Blake's animated, cartoony drawings. But the book's length and subtle humor make it less suitable for beginning readers. All ages.