Selfish Giant

by Oscar Wilde

Overview

Every afternoon, the children played in the Giant's garden. It was a large, lovely garden. After many years of being away, the Giant returned home and found the children playing in his garden. "What are you doing here?" he cried in a very gruff voice. Now, the Giant must decide: Will he share the garden or keep its beauty for himself?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140503838
Publisher:	Penguin UK
Publication date:	01/05/1982
Pages:	32
Product dimensions:	7.25(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.15(d)
Age Range:	3 Months to 3 Years

About the Author

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish author and poet best remembered for his plays and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Alexis Deacon is an author and illustrator whose previous picture books include Beegu, which was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal, Cheese Belongs to You!, and A Place to Call Home.

Date of Birth:

October 16, 1854

Date of Death:

November 30, 1900

Place of Birth:

Dublin, Ireland

Place of Death:

Paris, France

Education:

The Royal School in Enniskillen, Dublin, 1864; Trinity College, Dublin, 1871; Magdalen College, Oxford, England, 1874

Read an Excerpt

Every afternoon, as they were coming from school, the children used to go and play in the Giant's garden.

     It was a large lovely garden, with soft green grass. Here and there over the grass stood beautiful flowers like stars, and there were twelve peach-trees that in the spring-time broke out into delicate blossoms of pink and pearl, and in the autumn bore rich fruit. The birds sat on the trees and sang so sweetly that the children used to stop their games in order to listen to them. 'How happy we are here!' they cried to each other.

     One day the Giant came back. He had been to visit his friend the Cornish ogre, and had stayed with him for seven years. After the seven years were over he had said all that he had to say, for his conversation was limited, and he determined to return to his own castle. When he arrived he saw the children playing in the garden.

     'What are you doing here?' he cried in a very gruff voice, and the children ran away.

     'My own garden is my own garden,' said the Giant; 'any one can understand that, and I will allow nobody to play in it but myself.' So he built a high wall all round it, and put up a notice-board.

 

TRESPASSERS 
WILL BE 
PROSECUTED

 

     He was a very selfish Giant.

Editorial Reviews

"The richly sentimental 19th-century tale gets a 21st-century setting."
-Kirkus Reviews

" This remains a hopeful—and strangely timely—story about generosity and redemption."
- Publishers Weekly
 

"First published in 1888, Oscar Wilde’s classic short story of a miserable giant and his magical winter garden is reinvented with new depth, emotion, and an explosion of color. Clever details add modern touches while paying homage to the original tale of how a small child’s friendship slowly melts a giant’s cold heart. Christian themes of love, forgiveness, and sacrifice are clear throughout as the frozen garden gradually transforms into a beautiful riot of blossoms."
- Michelle Schingler, Foreword Reviews

From the Publisher

First published in 1888, Oscar Wilde’s classic short story of a miserable giant and his magical winter garden is reinvented with new depth, emotion, and an explosion of color. Clever details add modern touches while paying homage to the original tale of how a small child’s friendship slowly melts a giant’s cold heart. Christian themes of love, forgiveness, and sacrifice are clear throughout as the frozen garden gradually transforms into a beautiful riot of blossoms.

Foreword Reviews - Michelle Schingler

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)

Kirkus Reviews