The Selfish Giant

January 28, 2019
In a modern reimagining of Wilde’s classic tale, schoolchildren find refuge in a beautiful garden, but when a snarling, ginger-haired giant arrives, he angrily chases the children away and builds a “high wall” to keep them out—“He was a very selfish Giant.” But while spring flowers bud beyond the garden, winter persists inside. Bowman personifies the snow and frost as two vulpine figures clothed in garments of snowflakes and ice, the North Wind as an owl with bright blue eyes, and hail as a basket-toting baboon. As the seasons pass, the Selfish Giant hunkers down, wishing for spring; eventually, he hears music outside his window. The children have returned to the garden, now blooming, and the giant knocks down the wall. While Wilde’s unsettling ending and introduction of a Christ-like child bearing “the wounds of love” may prove perplexing for today’s readers, this remains a hopeful—and strangely timely—story about generosity and redemption. Ages 5–8.

December 1, 1987
Wilde's poignant tale of redemption deserves the renewed attention this volume gives it. In the story, a fierce giant who forbids little children to play in his garden is befriended by one small fellow. The giant's heart melts, and he allows the children to enter the garden, but the special child doesn't return for some time. At last the child appears, this time with holes in his hands and feet. "You let me play once in your garden,'' he tells the giant. ``Today you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.'' Mansell's illustrations combine a Tony Ross-like zaniness with a sense of the mysterious that perfectly underscores the story's spiritual theme. Ages 69.

January 15, 2019
The richly sentimental 19th-century tale gets a 21st-century setting.Poor artistic decisions stymie a worthy effort. Preserved here unaltered (though printed in teeny-tiny type), Wilde's economically written original makes for, as ever, stately, sonorous reading, aloud or otherwise. Visually, Bowman's eye-filling garden scenes sandwich genuinely shiver-inducing tangles of dry stalks swathed in frost and snow between, in better seasons, views of luxuriant masses of outsized flowers and greenery. The giant is a red-haired, white gent in moderately antique clothing...but the tiny children he chases away (and later welcomes back) are a racially diverse lot in school uniforms and sporting backpacks and hula hoops. Taped-up advertisements on the outside of the giant's wall and other details further add to the understated contemporary air, and the smallest child, who comes back at the end bearing stigmata to welcome the now-elderly giant to his garden, has an unruly shock of dark hair and an olive complexion. All of this updating comes to naught, though, because with supreme disregard for the story's essentially solemn tone and cadences, Bowman arbitrarily sticks in silly bits--first depicting Hail as a baboon with a bright red butt (the garden's other winter residents are at least embodied as northern animals) and then in a climactic scene putting the giant into humongous footie pajamas decorated with bunnies and carrots. Talk about discordant notes.Opinions may differ about the story's sublimity; here it's been made ridiculous. (Picture book. 6-9)

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