Giselle Giraffe

by Richard Turner, Ben Clifford (illustrator)

Hardcover

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Reviews

[Jennie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Giselle is unhappy with her long neck and lanky legs and visits the town to find a new look. At the flamingo's boutique she tries many, ridiculous items of clothes on the advice of the bird and has enough sense to realise that bikinis, scarfs, shirts and underpants are really not suitable! Returning to the wilds she is called upon to use her neck and legs to help other animals and learns to accept her body as it is. Turner has used rhyming verse to share this familiar tale of being comfortable in your own body and not trying to be something that you are not.

Clifford's illustrations provide a perfect foil for this tale, with wonderfully detailed images of not jut the giraffe but other African animals and then vivid colours to display the various articles of clothing and other 'humanised' animals. Fitting a giraffe into a bikini certainly plays on the imagination. Clifford has clearly had fun with the addition of various subplots as the different animals in the boutique also adopt the various clothing styles, and get up to other tricks. There are also items to find in each illustration - though there is no alert to these, observant children will soon notice that there is more than one character sharing Giselle's adventures.