When my kids had some friends over for a sleepover, I had to choose a book that I could read to all four of them (aged 8-11) in just one sitting, so thankfully we still had this Roald Dahl book to read! Sixty-two illustrated pages is like nothing for our story time, and we zipped right through it. I’m just not quite sure how our guests took it.
I had always thought that Esio Trot was the name of the man on the cover of the book, but a quick line from The Vicar of Nibbelswicke set me straight. The man is Mr. Hoppy, and “esio trot” is actually “tortoise” written backwards. That’s a pretty important fact for this tale.
The story follows Mr. Hoppy and the secret love he has for his downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Silver, a widow who seems to save her only love in this world for her precious tortoise, Alfie. When Mrs. Silver confides in Mr. Hoppy that she wishes Alfie would grow a bit faster, the wheels of his engineering mind spin, and he concocts a plan to grow her precious pet miraculously (well, mischievously) and thereby earn Mrs. Silver’s affection.
His deceptive ploy makes for good reading, of course, and normally I’d have passed over it with a small comment about lying, but with these extra little ears present for this one, I felt like I had to dig a little deeper. Was this dude right, lying to this woman and getting her to marry him without ever telling her the truth? After all, Mr. Hoppy gives Mrs. Silver exactly what she wanted (a bigger tortoise and a marriage proposal), so isn’t that all right, for the ends to justify the means?
Oh man, I could have gotten into the thick of things with that question! Instead, I fought the temptation to sermonize to my young guests and chose to pass over it, asking: “Was it good for him to lie to this woman?” (No.) “Right…even though she lived happily ever after.” And then I made a joke about “Llews pu” and we left it at that!
This story (published the year that Dahl died) wasn’t necessarily our favorite of all his books we’ve read yet, but it was certainly an imaginative yarn. It lacks much of the magic we’d expect to find in Dahl’s children’s books, yet a bit of silly humanity can be just as fun to read as that of magic fingers and chocolatiers. I doubt this story will get our young guests as hooked on Roald Dahl as we’ve been, but not everyone’s got our tastes…or so I’m learning.
Next up for us, Going Solo (1986)
©2023 E.T.
Read More from Roald Dahl:
- Adult Short Stories:
Over to You (1946)
Someone Like You (1953)
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (1977) - Children Fiction:
James and the Giant Peach (1961)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)
The Magic Finger (1964)
Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970)
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972)
Danny the Champion of the World (1975)
The Enormous Crocodile (1978)
The Twits (1980)
George’s Marvelous Medicine (1981)
The BFG (1982)
Dirty Beasts (1983)
Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984)
The Giraffe, the Pelly, and Me (1985)
Going Solo (1986)
Matilda (1988)
Esio Trot (1990)
The Minpins (1991)
The Vicar of Nibbleswicke (1991)