Esio Trot

Product Information

They also learn that men are clever and women are idiots, and that it's quite all right to neglect your interchangeable and therefore worthless pets. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Overall, Roald Dahl’s Esio Trot is a good, simple story that children aged 7 to 9 years old will adore, a love story inspired by Alfie the tortoise. Mr Hoppy is a shy elderly man who lives alone in an apartment, tending to his many plants, which have been the center of his life since he retired from his job in a bus garage several years before. Steering away from the completely silly, the story holds a strong possibility of truth, though one can never know what ideas Dahl uses for his writing.

She lives in the flat below his, and he frequently leans over his balcony and exchanges polite conversations with Mrs Silver, but his courage fails him whenever he prepares to hint at his true feelings for her. Suffice to say the next night when my boy asked to read the rest of the story, I deviated from the original script. He was also the author of Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG and many more brilliant stories. Unlike other Dahl works (which often feature tyrannical adults and heroic/magical children), Esio Trot is the story of an ageing, lonely man (Mr Hoppy), trying to make a connection with a person that he has loved from afar (his widowed neighbour, Mrs Silver). Quentin Blake has illustrated more than three hundred books and was Roald Dahl's favourite illustrator.

Such a lovely, harmless little story and it was short enough that we could read it in only 3 sittings (with my 6-7 year olds, so we can't sit on the carpet for too long!

But of course, that’s impossible, so Mr Hoppy has to come up with a plan, with the aid of a tortoise catcher and 140 tortoises, to make this happen and hopefully win Mrs Silver’s affections. The only thing this book seems to lack, which is so common in Dahl books, is someone "getting what they deserve" for their terrible behavior.To accompany the engaging text are some excellent drawings, it has been very well illustrated by the wonderful Quentin Blake. It was adapted by Richard Curtis and Paul Mayhew-Archer, and filming took place in May 2014 in London. One afternoon, Mrs Silver comments to Mr Hoppy that Alfie seems a bit bigger, but can not tell for sure.