The Famous Adventures of Jack
The Famous Adventures of Jack is a fantasy folk-tale. Jack, in search of the Giantkiller, meets many other Jacks as he gets entangled in a web of funny, exciting and enchanting stories. 7+
Sadly, The Famous Adventures of Jack is currently unavailable, although you may be able to find secondhand copies on Amazon or elsewhere.
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Of course there’s a story about it. But it’s not for you. Not at this time of night. Why, it would frighten the life out of you. Look at the cat, skimbled out of his wits. No, it’s not for you, that tale.
Ingeniously splicing the old and the new, this is a book that plays on children’s familiarity with fairy tales and which celebrates our need to hear old stories in a new way.
The Guardian
The Famous Adventures of Jack was nominated for the Blue Peter Award and the Kentucky Bluegrass Awards, 2002–3
The Famous Adventures of Jack was also published in the USA.
The Famous Adventures of Jack is dedicated to the memory of Katherine M Briggs, who was a novelist and a collector of British folk stories. She published an enormous encyclopaedia of folk stories that she had collected from all kinds of sources, sometimes just by sitting by the fire listening to an old country person telling the tale that their grandparents had told them. Without her, some wonderful stories would have been lost forever.
Quite a few of these stories are about a character called Jack. He’s our British folk hero, just as stories (sometimes the same ones) are told about Hans in Germany or Ivan in Russia. Sometimes he’s rich, and sometimes he’s brave, and sometimes he’s foolish, but he’s always called Jack.
Everybody knows the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, and many people shiver at the tale of Jack the Giant Killer, but not many of the other Jack stories are still told. So I decided to retell some of them, but I’ve set them inside a story of my own, where Jill, a black cat, and Old Mother Greenwood, set off in search of brave young Jack and the gruesome giant Cormoran in Cornwall. Before long, Jill gets drawn into an adventure which might make her even braver than Jack himself.