The BFG

The BFG (Big Friendly Giant)	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Written by Roald Dahl, Illustrated by Quentin Blake	2007
Fiction	206 pages
Reading Level age 7-12

Summary

Sophie lives in the orphanage in London. One night she cannot sleep and peeks out the window to find a giant man is blowing something from his suitcase into windows with a long trumpet. It sees her and runs off into the night carrying her. The giant introduces himself as the BFG (Big Friendly Giant) and warns not to go outside for the other giants would eat her. Sophie is relieved he won’t eat her, but horrified about his stories of all the giants who run off to different countries to snatch and gobble little children. They go to different countries, for they all have different tastes: people from Wales taste fishy and those from Jersey taste like cardigans, etc. The BFG explains the he is so small because he doesn’t eat human ‘beans’ but snozecumbers, disgusting variations of the cucumber. The BFG shows Sophie what he does with his long trumpet. He blows dreams into the sleeping homes for children to enjoy. He takes Sophie to where dreams are collected and shows how he labels the jars he stores them in. He has such big ears; he can hear what the dream is about. He jumped up and showed Sophie the writhing dark green dream, a captured nightmare. The BFG is so upset about the dream that they return to his cave without catching any more. On the way back, the BFG decides to set the dream on one of the giants. This causes him to jerk about and wake the closest giant with a kick. This continues until all were awake and fighting each other. This gives Sophie an idea. They mix a dream, much like a cake, adding parts from other dreams. The dream was full of human eating giants, the BFG and a little girl who had a solution to the problem. The person the dream was created for was the Queen of England. Sophie showed the BFG how to get in to the garden and to leave her on the sill. When the queen awoke from the terrible dream, she saw Sophie and knew that all the other parts of the dream were true. Sophie and the BFG were invited to breakfast where Sophie explains her plan to Her Majesty. The Queen agrees and sends helicopters to follow the BFG to Giant land. There the human-eating giants are tied up and hauled back to London. Meanwhile, the Queen had a gargantuan hole dug in preparation to imprison the giants. The BFG brought all his captured dream jars and gross snozecumbers with him on the trip. The snoozecumbers were for the giants, no more human beans. Sophie and the BFG were given homes to live in and were very famous. The BFG received schooling, for he learned from only one book that was human size, very small for him. He was so thrilled with his accomplishment he wrote a book, The BFG.

Response

I love this book. The concept of actual monsters that live not under the bed, where you can check, but in a land that is past all the blank pages on the map. I always pictured myself as Sophie, charged with solving a horrible problem and cast my father as the BFG, because he seemed like he was 24 feet tall when I was younger. The sketches are interesting and totally capture the personalities of the characters.

Potential problems

The BFG has a unique way of talking that can be confusing to some; it helps to be read aloud. This is a book about giant who steal children from their beds and eat them, leaving bones beneath the windows. It all ends well, but is very intense and describes the habits of the other giants at length.

Recommendations

I would recommend this to older children, with caution, some would be too sensitive and be traumatized by the vicious giants. It would be a great book to help with bullying, because all the other giants are mean and pick on the BFG.