Eve Bunting had a long life and a prolific career in children’s literature: she died in 2023 at the age of 94, after having published over 200 books.
I recently realized I hadn’t read many of her works, and so picked up her first book, the 1972 picture book The Two Giants. It is a good story, but feels very much like something from another age, or two or three other ages combined.
I say this in part because of the story itself: it retells the legend of the Giant’s Causeway. In this old folk story, a geological feature now called the Giant’s Causeway was created as a byproduct of a clash between an Irish giant (Finn MacCool) and a Scottish giant (in this telling, CulCullen, but with other names in other tellings.). Finn is a huge strong fellow, but not much of a fighter, and Culcullen is an even larger fellow, and is a violent giant…though as dim as he is large.
Rather than fight the invading Scottish giant, Finn enlists the normal humans he lives with in a great hoax: they dress him up as Finn’s baby, and Culcullen is so overwhelmed at the idea of a giant baby being, well, a giant’s baby, that he turns tail and runs. It’s a brains vs. brawn story, in other words, with a particular spin of Irish blarney.
The other reason this seems like it comes from another age is the presentation. The pages are full of words, making it quite jarringly wordy for someone used to contemporary picture books. Combine that with Eric Von Schmidt’s stylize illustrations (limited colors, and often resembling illustrated manuscripts), and this whole thing seems old.
It is, however, a pleasure. This would be a good book to read to kids, and to pause and ask what they think might happen, and a good gateway story for fables and legends.
