Giant Giant

Via his opening text and illustrations, Hewitt creates what appears to be an idyllic little community. However, spoiling that perfection are the actions of a giant who lives nearby and who daily stomps into the village making demands of the villagers while threatening to stomp on their houses if, for example, they don’t wash his underwear or cook him a feast. “And sometimes, even when he’d gotten everything he wanted...he’d stomp on a little house anyway. Just for fun.” Though some villagers did muster the courage to complain, the giant wouldn’t listen to these “little people”.
The giant was living the perfect life until... a giant giant appears on the scene, and the giant finds himself on the receiving end of the same demands and threats that he’d been making. Hearing the giant crying, the “always nice” villagers inquire about the source of his tears. Gently reminding the giant that he was just getting a taste of his own medicine, the villagers share with him the plan they had been intending to use on him - a trapping pit. With the giant’s assistance, the pit is dug deep enough to catch a giant giant, and, as the giant and the little people work together, “the little giant had a moment. ‘It’s so much better helping each other!’”

When the giant giant returns, the little giant successfully lures him into the trap where the captured giant giant begins to cry. The little giant steps forward to offer the same forgiveness and friendship that had been granted him, and so the little village became “now more peaceful than ever.”

Text, illustrations and layout, along with the book’s horizontal format, work together superbly in this picture book about bullying. The illustrations employ a limited pallette: the village and its people are rendered in blue, the giant in orange, and the giant giant in pink while all of the action occurs against a yellow background. Hewitt effectively uses different font sizes to indicate the varying noise volumes. Size relationships are rendered visually. For example, when the giant and a little person do a fist bump, the spread presents the entirety of the blue person but only the orange fist and wrist of the giant. And, on another spread, the boot of the giant giant towers over the now little giant. This book’s giants are not like the ferocious one found in “Jack and the Beanstalk” who would “grind his [victims’] bones to make my bread”. Instead, Hewitt has the little people use the term “big brat” to describe the giant, thereby reducing him to the playground/schoolyard garden-variety bully.

A fun read with a gentle message, Giant Giant would be an excellent library addition.