This charming picture book is an Eats, Shoots and Leaves for children who are beginning to learn the meaning and usage of the four main punctuation marks. Here the author has invented them as characters in their own right and they come to the rescue of Red Hoodie, who has written a story about her and her Gran and a wolf, but it has all gone wrong!
The punctuation characters spring into action to help her story make sense. But she doesn’t know who they are and so the full stop, the exclamation mark ‘an excitable guy’, the question mark and what Red Hoodie thinks is a ‘cute and curly’ comma ( ‘don’t call me that. I’m a clever comma and I’m in charge here’). The whimsical pictures (Granny in a bag because of a missing full stop!) to illustrate the meaning that Red has mistakenly written, will raise lots of laughs.
This is a very different sort of twisted fairy tale that will serve a useful purpose as well as to entertain. I can see older children wanting to rewrite other fairy tales in the same style to prove how well they know their punctuation.
In Don’t Eat Granny, Red Hoodie is trying to write a story about herself, her granny and a wolf along the lines of the well-known story of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’.
Red Hoodie's story is written in her own handwriting but there are punctuation mistakes and suddenly her sentences take on a different meaning.
Here’s one that comes at the start of the book: ‘Red Hoodie is going to visit Granny in her bag. Red Hoodie has a cake, cookies and candy.’ Red Hoodie has put the full stop in the wrong place and there’s an illustration showing poor Granny’s head poking out of her black handbag.
‘I can’t see how to put it right. Please someone help me!’ Red Hoodie calls out, and four little punctuation characters arrive on the page only to become caught up in the action.
This is a meta book – a story within a story and we see the page turns in the illustrations, with Red Hoodie peeping over the page to see what is going to happen next.
I wrote ‘Don’t Eat Granny’ for six-year-old Magnus and Bjorn who were learning about punctuation marks at school. They loved spotting punctuation jokes, so I created a story full of them!Gillian McClure
'Red Riding Hood as you’ve never seen her before. She’s Red Hoodie! Yes, there’s wolf and a granny. But is granny going to be eaten? No, because with her bag of tools, Red Hoodie comes to the rescue. See how she does it in this cool, elegant and stylish version of an old story.' - Joyce Dunbar
Author
About Gillian McClure
Gillian McClure is the author and illustrator of thirty picture books. Several of them have been short-listed for awards; one was highly commended for the Kate Greenaway Medal and another, Selkie, won the US Parent’s Guide to Children’s Media Award for Outstanding Achievement in Children’s Books.
Gillian has served on the CWIG committee, and the PLR Advisory committee, been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Kent and Essex Universities, and a judge and mentor for Escalator, New Writing Partnerships.
Two of her books have been Recommended Books on the National Curriculum and others she uses in the workshops she gives in schools and colleges.
