Let’s welcome April 2025 with a new book of the month: The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling. Originally published in 1984, the book is a collection of short stories, three of them following a boy called Mowgli, who was raised in the jungle by wolves.
Mowgli’s stories are called Mowgli’s Brothers, Kaa’s Hunting, and Tiger! Tiger!. The other short stories are as follows: The White Seal, in which a seal hunts for a place to be free of hunting humans, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, which is the story of a mongoose that saves a family from two snakes, Toomai of the Elephants, which follows a boy who sees elephants dance, and His Majesty’s Servants, which is a conversation of different animals in the army it night. Each story tells about animals and how they work together or live around one another.
The Law of the Jungle, which never orders anything without a reason, forbids every beast to eat Man except when he is killing to show his children how to kill, and then he must hunt outside the hunting grounds of his pack or tribe.
-Rudyard Kipling, Mowgli’s Brothers
Each story starts with a poem and ends with a song, and contains a clear fable, which is traditional for some children’s stories of this era. The book is more well known for the movie it was made into, but the original stories are fun enough that adults will enjoy reading them to children.
The personification of animals is a classic trope in kid’s stories, but that just adds to the charm of these texts. The book doesn’t only serve as entertainment; with its fables, it can be a good learning oppourtunity for children about how to behave and trreat others. I would reccomend this book to anyone with young children, and I enjoyed reading it on my own as well.
- Rating: 𝙶
- Author: Rudyard Kipling
- Published: 1984
- Review: ★★★★t☆