Final reading posts

I could not go past this book when I saw it in the library, I haven't read it since I was quite young so loved that I had an excuse to open up a this childrens book again.  This is one of my all time favourites- Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl and illustrations by Quentin Blake.

I'm sure everyone knows this story, but the book starts off introducing the three farmers, Farmer Boggis, Farmer Bunce and Farmer Bean.   This gives an insight to each mans farm and their personalities, here Dahl describes them as "nasty men" the illustrations also help the reader understand the physical characteristics of the farmers.  Each of which have been outsmarted by the clever, tricky Mr. Fox who lives underground beside a tree with his wife and his children.  Mr Fox makes nightly visits to the three farms and steals whatever is avaliable to him.  Tired of this, the farmers make a plan to shoot Mr. Fox, missing Mr. Fox they instead shoot off his tail. Not happy with this outcome the farmers plan to dig up his hole inorder to kill Mr. Fox. 

This also disturbs the other creatures living underground so in order to survive Mr. Fox makes another plot to gather food for the undergroud creatures (once again at three farmers farms). 
The creatures celebrate with a banquet (The great feast) of the 'stolen' foods and explains to the creatures they can live with him and his family and hunt for food like he does without the worry of hunter. While the three farmers are outside still waiting for Mr. Fox to emerge still with their loaded guns in hand.

In keeping with the Roald Dahl theme I decided to read The Magic Finger also illustrated by Quentin Blake as I actually have never had the opportunity to read this book.  I really like how the story is narrated by a girl who lives next door to the Gregg family.  The story focuses on this family and how they hunt ducks for fun. 

The girl achieves the power to punish people how make her unhappy with her "Magic finger" although she does not have complete control over his.  She finds it unfair that the Greggs are killing the ducks and so points her finger at them in anger.  The next day the Greggs wake up as miniture people with wings instead of arms and in their house is four large ducks with arms instead of their wings.  The family are forced out of their house decided to build a nest as a subsitute.  The next morning they awake to find the large ducks standing near their nest with guns drawn at them, just like the way the Greggs once hunted the ducks.   This makes the Greggs vow not to hunt again and inturn allows them to turn into their normal human bodies again, the family also decide to destroy their guns and to dig the ducks they already killed grave sights.  The Greggs even change their name to the Eggs.  Amoungst this the girl then hears another gun being fired, she leaves the Greggs by telling them that the family that let off the gun fired 'They'll be nesting in the trees tonight, every one of them!'.