13 Julia Donaldson Stories - Ranked and Reviewed

Am I a metaphor?

Julia Donaldson stories are like a nice scent that you come across one day in early parenthood, and you think 'that’s nice'. So then someone follows you around spraying the scent in your face and on your clothes and bed and every room of your house and in your car and everywhere you go, every day, five times a day for the next four years until you can’t smell anything else.

We love Julia Donaldson, of course. Don't get me wrong. But as my eldest child is moving on (to the brilliant Roald Dahl), and my youngest is just starting to ride the JD wave, I thought I’d take this opportunity to rank and review, from worst to best, 13 of her stories that have occupied so much of our lives in recent years.

13. The Smartest Giant in Town

Putting aside the long-winded and tedious narrative, there are deeper issues with the story that earn this last place on my list. This is a normal town, seemingly populated by giants. But the relationship between the giants and the regular-sized people is never explained. Are the regular-sized people subservient to the giants? Are they afraid the giants will one day turn on them? But if the giants are dominant, why does George have to wait for a shop to open up just so that he can buy some smart clothes? Is it really a story about social mobility, the shirt and tie emblematic of the naively hopeful departure from his working class roots? A departure that is destined to fail as, one by one, the symbols of his middle class life, so loosely fixed, begin to fall away from his corporeal essence, leaving him so tragically, shamefully exposed?

Perhaps not. What this story does do, however, is highlight how inadequate his charitable acts are when compared with the underlying structural reforms that are needed in what is clearly a failed state. A family of mice are the victims of a brutal and, one imagines, unprovoked arson attack. We don’t know how many were killed. But apparently we’re supposed to smile happily as George gives them his shoe to live in instead. No enquiry, no long-term financial aid, no consequences for perpetrators who for all we know might still be at large. As he hops merrily away, I honestly don’t know whether we are supposed to feel joy or utter despair. Either way, by the time he gives his belt to the dog I have lost all sympathy with George, and I was left with little interest in whether or not he got his original clothes back. Missing the opportunity to pursue meaningful political reform, George ultimately shows himself to be little more than a dangerous idiot.

12. Gruffalo’s Child

I’ve ended up reading this more than the Gruffalo, which is a travesty of justice because the latter is infinitely superior to this tawdry mess. It reeks of a sequel that exists only because of the success of the original story. Where the Gruffalo was inventive and genre-bending, this is derivative and predictable. It strikes me very much as the demand of the publishing house rather than Donaldson. 

We have to wait a full 20 pages before we meet the most interesting character of the original story, the mouse. Before then, we see the ‘child’ of the gruffalo on a quest that contains no danger, and no great promise of reward. It is a meaningless, self-indulgent wander through the forest. He encounters minor characters who themselves almost appear embarrassed to be in this story, like actors reluctantly reprising a role they no longer have any interest in themselves, but who know that they might as well cash in while there’s still demand from a braying, simple public. By the time the absurd and preposterous denouement plays out, all I am left feeling is sorry for all the people involved in this shambolic cash cow.

11. Tyrannosaurus Drip

While the championing of veganism in Tyrannosaurus Drip is welcome, I can’t help but feel this is immediately undermined by Donaldson’s deeply challenging use of forced abbreviations. She devotes a whole line to telling us that she is going to refer to the Compsognathus as ‘comp’ when it is clear that the only reason she is doing so is because she cannot get compsognathus to scan as part of her couplets. Likewise, no-one before or since has ever referred to a Tyrannosaurus Rex as ‘T’. She is asking a lot of the reader.

But perhaps my main issue is her take on the nature vs nurture debate, that opens up when the duck-billed dinosaur inadvertently finds himself at the centre of what would have been a valuable study into monozygotic adoptive twins, had some psychologists been around to study them. In her portrayal of the duck-billed dinosaur’s pacifism, she appears to be weighing heavily down on the nativist approach, perhaps channeling Freud’s notion of Thanatos, the idea that we are born with an innate death-instinct that continues regardless of environmental factors. But it’s unclear whether she has read Albert Bandura’s studies into social learning theory, and his findings that observational learning can play as significant a role as operant conditioning in developing tendencies towards violence and aggression in young children. There is an interesting discussion to be had. It doesn't happen in this book.

10. Toddle Waddle

While she is famous for the lengthy character-led stories that make up the rest of this list, less is known about Donaldson’s foray into experimental modernism. Toddle Waddle does not have a narrative arc as such, and it becomes clear early on that we are not going to see much in the way of characterisation. Instead it becomes an almost Joycean sequence of hallucinatory fragments, imagery and meaning floating across the pages without form or structure. It is a challenging read, and I found it hard to really get what the author was trying to say. You think at first that these are a series of onamatopoeiae, but then you realise that most of them in fact aren’t. They are command words. But who is commanding whom? Are the group being led by the duck? Or are they chasing the duck into the sea? Either scenario is disturbing.

A cyclist rings his bell into the void. No-one seems to hear him. A girl is on her mobile phone, oblivious to the encroaching tide. A band plays on an abandoned pier, a wordless, discordant tune, like something out of Lynch, or even Eisenstein. The emotional darkness at the heart of each episode jars uncomfortably with the bright colours and naive lines of Sharratt’s illustrations. There may be a place for this level of abstract expressionism in children’s literature, but I’m not convinced.

9. Stick Man

Stick man’s a great story - the titular protagonist is well-rounded and sympathetic, and the plot is full of adventure, humour and moments of genuine peril. The reason it is not higher up the list is because, as a father, I find the sense of paternal loss running through the story too harrowing for me. Stick Man is clearly a doting, loving parent to his three stick children. Yet, having been abducted while going for a jog on, they spend the best part of three quarters of a year (from Spring until Christmas day), with him missing, presumed dead. Parents of missing children will say that it’s the not knowing that is the worst. The lack of closure that leaves them unable to go through the necessary stages of the grieving process.

He is clearly still very much in their thoughts, right up until Christmas eve, at which point it looks like Stick Lady is probably suffering from PTSD and/or depression. Has she still laid a place at the table for him? It is tragic if she has, but no less so if she hasn’t. Either way we can only presume that neither her or her three children have had access to any of the support networks needed to help them effectively process this trauma. Was Stick Man even thinking about any of this while he was helping Santa deliver the presents to all the girls and boys? The smile on his face suggests not. So no, I can’t be happy at the inevitable reunion on the final page. For these are children who will be turning up at doors like mine, in a few years, needing an urgent CAMHS referral as the suppressed memories of their father’s absence play out in adolescent control-seeking behaviours. Ninth place for Stick Man.

8. The Highway Rat

A complex tale of sin and redemption, the Highway Rat is quite dark for a children’s story. The nefarious rodent is seen tormenting the residents of the area, threatening them, stealing what little food they have. Does he... do worse things to them? Donaldson leaves this to our imagination. And yet it is the character of his horse that I find most troubling in the ambiguity of his motivation. Is he benevolent? The TV adaptation would certainly have it so, portraying him as a kind and intelligent foil to the evils of his base and arrogant master. But if the horse is good, why does he let so much horror unfold? All it takes for evil to happen is for good horses to do nothing. It is surely in his power to stop the highway rat, and yet he carries him from atrocity to atrocity without muttering a word.

So perhaps he is not good. Perhaps he is a co-conspirator? Aiding and abetting the rat as he wreaks destruction on all around him. In which case, why does Donaldson let him off so lightly at the end? He suffers no consequences for his years of inaction, and expects us to laud him for bringing about the moment that leads to the final redemption?

7. Room on the Broom

Room on the Broom is the most overtly political of all of Donaldson’s works. Scheffler himself cited it in his famous pro-EU speech at the 2018 illustrator’s awards ceremony. The benevolent witch, gatekeeper to the nation of the broom, adopts an open-border policy, seemingly allowing migrants to come onto the broom regardless of the views of the ‘indigenous’ cat. While in the original text the cat seems ambivalent of the new arrivals, in the film version Rob Brydon plays the cat as a conservative, Brexit-voting nationalist whose warnings that they are ‘reaching breaking point’ go unheeded by the liberal leader.

But her immigration policy is never fully explained, and this is problematic. On one level it seems like she is almost following an Australian-style points system, each new arrival having to demonstrate some kind of utilitarian value to the project before they are allowed on. Fascinatingly, the TV adaptation adds another layer to this that the book doesn’t. Here we see their back stories, as societal outcasts, victims of persecution. The bird belonged to a minority race. The frog was suffering from mental health difficulties. So in this version at least they are refugees rather than economic migrants.

And then the rupture. Too many have entered, and the nation cracks. The dragon of fascism threatens to devour the witch’s left-wing pluralism. But the migrants and the indigenous members of the community each work together to repair the broom, making it anew, bringing something of their own culture to rebuild it again. It is an important message, well told. And Britain should indeed take note of Scheffler’s words: “if you have no friends in a hostile environment – the dragons may come and get you.”

6. Zog

Beneath Zog’s jolly facade there is a serious feminist parable that is being told. The main authority figures are female - the headteacher Madame Dragon ruling over her pupils with kindness and high expectations. And Princess Pearl, of course, with her rejection of traditional gender roles. The males, represented by Zog, Gaddabout, and the nameless red dragon who represents a kind of Ayn Rand, hyper competitive neo-capitalist individualism, all find their outdated ‘power’ rendered impotent by the intelligent logic of the females.

But it is the school itself I have issues with. In particular the pedagogical underpinnings (or lack thereof) of Madame Dragon’s curriculum. She seems to belong to the Piagetian school of educational philosophy. ‘Now that you’ve been shown, you can practise on your own.’ Except they can’t, can they. Her naive optimism, and specifically the lack of a scheme of learning that includes any detail of scaffolding or differentiation, leads to disaster for her lowest ability student. I mean actual physical harm. And without wanting to sound like some health and safety loving snowflake, should she really be allowed to continue teaching while at least one of her students is routinely succumbing to serious injury? Where is the oversight anyway? A decent line manager would at least be inviting her to consider Zog’s difficulty’s in terms of Vygotsky’s Zones of Proximal Development, perhaps encouraging her to have some of the dragons working in supportive peer-groups instead of in isolation. Just a thought.

5. What the Ladybird Heard

I find the ladybird in what the ladybird heard one of the most exquisitely enigmatic characters in the entire canon of 21st Century literary fiction. She has no face to speak of. And we are told that up until this point she has had no voice. Or limbs. And yet she emits a sense of wondrous omniscience, managing to organise her peers (the rest of the farmyard animals) to become what is effectively a tightly co-ordinated militia using little more than her intellect, bringing justice to bear on a couple of local malefactors like some agrarian vigilante, commanding her troops not through force, but by inviting them to trust in her calm and quiet judgement. She is perhaps the hero we need in these unsettling times.

What is her relationship with the farmer in all this? We cannot be sure. She corrals her troops, protects the fine prize cow, but ultimately it's all for him. It's certainly not for the benefit of the cow, who is presumably oblivious to his forthcoming adventure to the magical pink-glittered abattoir. Do the other animals know of his inevitable fate, as little more than a 'fine prize' display in a butcher's window? If they do, it certainly puts their cooperative efforts to 'save' him in a very different light. And how much of the ladybird's obeisance is related to the fact that she is the only creature not actually dependent on the farmer? She has wings so presumably can fly away whenever she likes. Like some Old Testament morality parable, it is as if she is granted complete freedom in this story, but in return must ensure that the God / farmer is able to kill the cow himself.

And yet... The tired cliches of the felons. Born to be bad. Two-dimensional. Treading the familiar path to prison and onwards (as we see in the sequel, What the Ladybird Heard Next), into an inevitable cycle of recidivism. Donaldson shows a brutal lack of sympathy with what are ostensibly fragile characters, choosing not to, perhaps because she can’t, explore the motivation behind their criminality. The issues around body image, bullying and self-esteem that have plagued Hefty Hugh since he was a child. The home life of ‘Lanky’ Len. Where, for instance, was Mr Len, or indeed any positive male role models, when he needed them? Where was the secure attachment he needed as an infant to help him develop resilience and a sense of self-worth that would have led him perhaps to gainful employment rather than into the arms of Hugh, whose promise of a ‘cunning plan’ probably offered the sense of belonging that young Leonard never truly felt as a child? Also sirens go nee-naw (to rhyme with door), not ‘nee-nah’ just so that it can be forced to rhyme with ‘panda car’. Ridiculous. Fifth place.

4. The Snail and the Whale

With Snail and the Whale we return to the theme of social mobility that seems to preoccupy this author. Donaldson herself grew up in a large Victorian house near Hampstead Heath, but according to her Wikipedia page she did spend some time performing to children in council estates. The snail wants to leave her metaphorical estate, the rock by the dock, and go on what essentially amounts to a glorified gap year on the back of a kind whale, with whom they, predictably, discover the symbiotic co-dependency common to this genre.

There is an interesting moment in the excellent Magic Light adaptation where they get to the snail's line "I feel so small". Sally Hawkins delivers it with a tone of fear, tinged with melancholy. It is then in response to this line (in the TV version anyway) that the whale alters his course in such a way that brings about his perilous collision with the shoreline, thus making him partially responsible for his downfall. This is harsh on the whale, I feel. No, in the original text it is clearly the speedboats (the environmental destruction) zigging and zagging all over the place that cause the whale's disorientation. He is an innocent victim. So whenever I am reading the ‘I feel so small’ line, I project the sense not of anxiety but of awestruck wonder that I feel was the author's original intention.

I am putting this so high up because I think Donaldson genuinely manages to somehow capture the excitement and the freedom of unfettered international travel in that period before adult responsibilities tie us down to our respective rocks, as black as soot. So much so, that I am even prepared to accept the preposterous school blackboard scene, where the teacher and children gape open-mouthed while the snail writes a sentence that would, in reality, have taken her about an hour and a half to compose.

 

3. The Gruffalo

Despite all the acclaim that the Gruffalo has rightly earned in the 20 years since its inception, it is still hard to overstate the novelty and complexity of its plot structure. Most of the stories on this list follow fairly conventional narrative arcs, the separation and reunification story, characters learning something about themselves etc. But not this. This is something from the darker end of the Brothers Grimm, elements of magic realism and Eastern folklore mixing with post-structuralist semiotics.

The book is not named after the central protagonist. Instead the titular character is a product of the hero’s imagination. Or is he? The Gruffalo figure straddles this ambiguous line between fiction and reality; our best guess is that he is the fictional become real through the mouse's telling of stories. A Baudrillardian simulacra who exists in a realm once removed from the authentic, original forest dwellers who flee him because they know not what else to do (note the clues in the colours used, the orange eyes and purple prickles - orange and purple are commonly used by Donaldson / Scheffler to denote 'otherness', as in the glompoms of the Wurpular Wood in Smeds and Smoods, in contrast to the dark greens and browns reserved for the ‘natural’ woodland creatures).

But what exactly are they all fleeing? The mouse's psychological projections of his inner fears, manifest in 'flesh'? Or are they fleeing their own hidden insecurities? This is Donaldson's artistry at its finest. In the Chinese folk tale from which The Gruffalo derives (狐假虎威), in which a fox saves himself from a tiger by leading him through a broad highway, inviting him to regard the terror of the travellers they meet, there is no question that the fox and the tiger are both equally real. It is Donaldson who adds the ambiguity surrounding the nature of the Gruffalo's very existence.

Ultimately of course the mouse finds solace in the only reality of which he, and by extension the reader, can be sure. The nut. A symbol of sustenance. A tree in embryonic form. The nut is the natural counterpoint of the Gruffalo. The nut is something big and real (a tree) manifest as something tiny and self-contained. Whereas in creating (?) the Gruffalo, the mouse took something invisible (his fears), and grew them into something huge and terrifying. So while at first this appears to be a story celebrating the cunning of a small underdog, what emerges is a cautionary tale of what happens when you suppress your fears. Refuse to acknowledge your deep-rooted anxieties and they will emerge from the depths of your subconscious at unpredictable times and in ways that are hard to control.

2. Paper Dolls

I would have had this as my number one, it is the best story on this list, were it not for the fact that neither of my children have every showed much interest in it. Perhaps it is the lightness of touch in Rebecca Cobb’s simple pencil lines that puts them off; they have always shown a preference for Scheffler’s bold lines and primary colours. Or perhaps it’s the fact that their mother and I are usually in tears by the final pages.

I am reluctant to say too much about the story for fear of depriving anyone who hasn’t read it yet of the book’s emotional impact. I don’t think this matters for the other books on the list, but for this one it does. In it, Donaldson is at her magical best, deftly taking the reader in and out of different perspectives, the child’s, the mother’s, the narrator’s, the dolls themselves. We float between imaginary worlds, and the brutal reality of the world outside, and back again. Hours, days, years and generations collapse in on themselves, reflecting not only that sense of hazy timelessness in childhood, but also capturing perfectly the way that memories allow us to transcend the physical limitations of time and space. A triumph.

1. Tiddler

If you don't think Tiddler is Donaldson's finest work then you probably aren’t reading it properly. It is a masterpiece, and the only one on this list that marries form and content so beautifully. It is a joy to read out loud; a metric beat which casually echoes that of the undulating waves. No syllable is lost, nothing is shoehorned in to help a line rhyme or scan. Each sound delicately falls into place to develop both the narrative and oratorical flow.

Like in The Gruffalo, it is not the central protagonist that holds our greatest sympathies. No, this is a story not about Tiddler, but about little Johnny Dory. Johnny Dory, who embodies the platonic love of a classmate. Fiercely loyal, in the face of mounting hostility, and at the expense of his own status in the 'school'. Faithful not just to Tiddler, of course, but faithful to the power of storytelling. Tiddler is of course not a story about fish, no. It is about the stories that wind their way like seaweed through the ebb and flow of our lives. And as they help Tiddler find his way 'home', so too must we allow them to take us on our own adventures, and towards a deeper understanding of ourselves.

There will be those, like dragonfish, and redfin, who reject the power of stories, condemned to a lifetime of scouring their tiny patch of seabed for whatever krill will sustain them until their lonely deaths. But there are those, like Tiddler and Johnny Dory, like my two sons, like you, and I, who believe in the power of stories. Who allow ourselves to become trapped in their beguiling nets. And for us, there awaits the riches of all the world's oceans, and all the stars beyond.