The Iron Giant by Ted Hughes Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Iron Giant
Book Review: Childhood classic.
Summary: 5 Stars
Bought the Iron Giant video, paperback, and the original version (The Iron Man) so my college age son could enjoy them again and keep them for his future family.Book Review: Excitement and suspense without violence!
Summary: 4 Stars
I have read this book with my Fourth Grade classes for the last eight years. The reading, while "easy", is nonetheless rich. My students' writing is often rife with violence. It can be difficultto convince them that excitement and suspense canbe achieved without "blood and guts". After reading the Iron Giant, they are pleasantly surprised and often write "sequels" to the Iron Giant's adventures. The prose is poetic. It makes a terrific read aloud.Book Review: Exciting science fiction for children!
Summary: 5 Stars
As a third grade teacher, I always read this book aloud to my students in between my machines and space units (It fits both)! The kids love this book. It is not too scary for third graders, but just thrilling enough to leave them begging for you to keep reading. Wonderful read-aloud!Book Review: Favorite childhood book
Summary: 5 Stars
Poetically written, metaphorically sound, and a joy to read.
I used to read this roughly twice a week when I was 8 or 9. Picked it up again recently.
Amazingly relevant and formative in the academic direction I took.
Still can't bring myself to watch the film however.
Book Review: Ironic Iron
Summary: 5 Stars
Neither children nor adults need know the intricacies of Ted Hughes' life to appreciate this book. In fact, they might be better off not knowing. England's poet laureate drove two wives to suicide--Sylvia Plath and, six years later, Assia Welville, who also murdered her child. Readers need know nothing about the Cold War, either, though Hughes clearly created this story as an allegory about the evil of war. He gave the characters very little development. Hogarth, the boy who centers the movie based very loosely on this book, functions as a sort of trigger. But there's not much explanation about why he acts, or why anyone acts, for that matter.
Nevertheless, the plot will draw even the most tortured second-grade reader into its tangle of fantasy, words and poetry. And once there, he will find it impossible to escape until the book is done. (My favorite part is the music of the spheres--the music that space made, a strange soft music, deep and weird, like millions of voices singing together.)
The Iron Giant came to the top of a cliff one night, no one knows how or from where he had come. The wind sang through his iron fingers, and his great iron head, shaped like a dustbin but big as a bedroom, slowly turned right, then slowly turned left. Down the cliff he fell, his iron legs, arms and ears breaking loose and falling off as he went. The pieces scattered, crashed, bumped, clanged down onto the rocky beach far below, where the sound of the sea chewed away at it, and the pieces of the Iron Giant lay scattered far and wide, silent and unmoving.
See what I mean? When the Giant was discovered after biting a tractor in two, the farmers whose equipment he had ruined dug a deep enormous hole, a stupendous hole on the side of which they put a rusty old truck to attract him. Hogarth lured the Giant there, and when he finally came to the trap, the farmers filled it in on top of him and let out a great cheer. Of course, the Giant escaped, and Hogarth (who felt guilty) found a home for him in the local scrap yard, where he could eat tractors to his heart's content.
Then arrived from Space a terribly black, terribly scaly, terribly knobbly, terribly horned, terribly hairy, terribly clawed, terribly fanged creature with vast indescribably terrible eyes, each one as big as Switzerland. It landed in Australia, where it covered the whole continent, and all the armies of the world decided to fight this space-bat-angle-dragon, who demanded live creatures as food. They declared war and lost. It was Hogarth's idea to call upon the Iron Giant for help.
I won't tell you how the story ended. But the important point, for grown-ups at least, is that in creating his 1968 Cold War space-bat-angle-dragon, the erstwhile pacifist poet Hughes also created a vision of evil incarnate--the kind of evil that wishes to engulf the entire world, that cannot be reasoned with, cannot be pacified and must be fought. Ironic, isn't it? Alyssa A. Lappen
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