What does a human bean from Turkey taste like?
If you don't know the answer, go and ask the Bonecruncher Giant.
He will certainly know. Every night Bonecruncher is galloping off to Turkey to gobble Turks.
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| The BFG Cover |
What about human beans from Panama, Wales or Jersey? Each region has a peculiar taste, and for the giants, galloping off to one or another place is, to us, like opening the fridge and deciding what to have for dinner.
It doesn't sound extremely encouraging if you're a little orphan who's just been snatched by a big-eared giant. Does it?
Sophie, our little heroine, has been taken from the orphanage, but actually, she has been saved from the horrible Mrs Clonkers, who punished children locking them in the dark cellar for 24 hours with nothing to eat or drink (Does that ring a bell?).
She is inspired by the author's niece, Sophie, and is the first girl to appear as a protagonist in one of Dahl's books; a busybody little kid who will find the solution and the courage to stop giants' night incursions to gobble human beans.
She has good luck because the giant who kidnapped her is the Big Friendly Giant, whose hobby is to hunt dreams, to blow them into the bedroom of those sleeping children he visits during the witching hour.
Dreams, he says, is very mysterious thing.They is floating around in the air… And they are like bubbles making just a little buzzing-humming noise, imperceptible by human beans.
They live in the Dream Country together with nightmares.
Only the BFG, thanks to his special big ears, can hear them and is able to catch and lock them into a glass jar.
Thousand of jars that he accurately collects and classifies; each one has its label with an accurate description of the dream inside. There are dreams suitable for all tastes ready to be blown through the long trumpet every night.
The BFG spreads nice lovely dreams exactly like Dahl tells his stories, collected over his life, to enrich children's imagination.
With his super ears he can also hear all the secret whispering of the world.
From ladybirds to plants he demonstrates Sophie that every living thing on the Earth has a soul and gives us a great lesson of ecology.
Sophie is afraid to be eaten but the BFG shows her what kind of food he lives on to avoid eating people: Snozzcumbers! A sort of enormous black and white striped cucumbers, that are the only vegetables capable of growing in the desolate land of Giants, but they taste of frogskin and rotten fish!
But not all the children are as lucky as her, because many of them will soon disappear during the night, swallowed by a nasty giant.
So she decides that something has to be done immediately to save children's lives and convinces the BFG to prepare a terrible nightmare that will be blown into the very Queen of England's room to make her aware of the terrible facts, but most importantly, will reveal to her the existence of the BFG.
Will the Queen believe to a dream? Will the little orphan manage to be heard? And will the BFG be treated with respect and not as a circus attraction?
I warmly recommend you to read this book. It's adventurous, it's fun, it's full of strange words, but especially it teaches us to see things from a different perspective.
http://www.derbylive.co.uk/documents/TheBFGEducationPack.pdf
Lucy
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