The Minpins
by Roald Dahl
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Book Summary Information
Author: Roald DahlIllustrator: Patrick Benson
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1994-11-01
ISBN: 0140549706
Number of pages: 48
Publisher: Puffin
Book Reviews of The Minpins
Book Review: sweet and fun with lovely illustrations
Summary: 5 Stars
A short and cute picture book, The Minpins is one of Dahl's more younger-child-friendly stories. It features protagonist Billy, an adventurous and brave boy who enters the dangerous woods alone.
Billy's allies are little people that live in trees and climb about using green suction boots. His mother tells him not to venture into the woods, where children and others disappear, but he disobeys and goes. There, he helps the Minpins by killing the Gruncher monster. Like the story of Alice in Wonderland, he returns to the real world, but continues to go, flying on the back of a swan each night.
The pictures are sweet, the words Dahl invents are fun to say, and the imagery is fun.
Summary of The Minpins
Running from the terrible Grinder monster of the woods, a young boy is rescued by the tree-dwelling Minpins, a tiny race of nature-loving beings who live in an ancient tree high above the forest floor and travel on the backs of birds. Reprint.Someday someone will write a book that begins with a mother forbidding her child to enter the deep dark woods and ends with that child achieving incredible success without ever setting a toe in the forbidden forest. But not this book. Here, Billy's mom issues a few scary warnings about the woods to her son--"Beware! Beware! The Forest of Sin! None come out, but many go in!"--turns her back for a second, and the next thing you know the devil shows up and whispers something to Bobby about wild strawberries. Blammo! Guess where Billy goes--straight to the forbidden forest, of course. At this point, if you are reading the story aloud to your child, you may think there's a parable on the way. But just when you might expect to run into monsters named Lust, Avarice, and Three-Toed Sloth (okay, maybe not Lust), a real monster comes careening along and you realize that this story is just a fairy tale after all--and quite a lovely one at that.
The Minpins taps into the powerful, wonderful child's fantasy of discovering a hidden civilization of tiny folk that accepts and honors him or her. The very best part of this fairy tale is the denouement, where Billy receives the gift of nightly escape on the wings of a swan. One of Roald Dahl's only picture books--with fabulously crosshatched pen-and-ink illustrations by Patrick Benson--The Minpins is superb for reading aloud to the three- to eight-year-old set. And it culminates in a sentence or two of advice that your children just might remember for the rest of their lives. (Ages 3 to 8)
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