Sur la grosse pomme

by Giorgio Vanetti (Illustrator)

inscribed inside the front cover

24 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

Reviews

[Sarah Sammis]

Before Sean's two "rough days" at school he brought home The Little Green Caterpillar to read. It is one of the books that Miss Christina is using to teach from for the younger class (2 to 3 1/2 year olds). She said Sean could borrow it but he had to bring it back in the morning. Fortunately he remembered the next morning to take it back school.

The Little Green Caterpillar is translated from a French children's book and is very similar to The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle except that the caterpillar doesn't come off as such a glutton as the one in the Carle book. Rather than making the story about how much the caterpillar eats, Hooker makes it about the different kinds of things the caterpillar eats and the different creatures he meets before making his cocoon. Of the two books, I much prefer The Little Green Caterpillar as it seems to take a healthier approach to the story of eating and growing up.

[Stephanie]

Basically a copycat of The very hungry caterpillar with meaner characters who don't let the caterpillar eat anything. i feel bad for the caterpillar and i feel like it exemplifies unkind behavior. the book description here says the animals are telling the caterpillar the food isn't appropriate for it, but that's not how it's portrayed in the book at all. instead, it reads like no one would share with the caterpillar (and they're harsh about it too like "no!" or "go away! this isnt for you!" I dont want my kid thinking that's how you should talk to other people). At the end, the caterpillar is humiliated, offended, hungry etc and ends up only eating a leaf before he builds his cocoon, becomes a butterfly, and flies off. maybe the moral of the story is people can treat you poorly and you become a beautiful butterfly at the end? i dont know, i really don't enjoy reading this to my child (and only do because it's my partner's childhood book) and have started changing the lines to make the characters kinder.

the book format also doesn't make sense - why have holes in all the pages when the caterpillar didn't even get to eat thru any of it?

i'd give this book 0 stars if i could.

[Kerry]

Looking at this book decades later, I am struck by a couple of things: the caterpillar's desperate frustration in trying to find something to eat, going from one juicy-looking piece of oversized produce to another, always encountering someone who has claimed it as food first. The second is the incongruency between the insects and animals that claim the fruit/vegetables compared to what they actually eat and their relative size. The book is made of cardboard pages, through which progressively smaller holes have been bored, each one appearing "through" a piece of food, as though the insects and other animals have taken their first bites before the caterpillar's appearance. These provided little fingers to turn pages more easily but also indicated the progression of the story. A strange and clever book fraught with psyschology.

[Maria Hatzialexiou]

To be honest I had never read this book until now and I thought it was sweet. I think this is a book that would get a child to keep questioning why the other bugs would not share with the caterpillar. I think this is a great learning lesson type of book and I know that I would like to continue to share this book with other children in my life.

[Huda Fel]

I liked the hungry 1 much more

[Angie Harrold]

one of my childhood books