Just So Stories

Thirteen classic children’s stories from the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Jungle Book. Inspired by the bedtime stories Rudyard Kipling told his own daughter, Josephine, the charming tales in Just So Stories, including “How the Leopard Got His Spots” and “How the Camel Got His Hump,” attempt to answer the many questions children have about animals. “Children love these stories as well because of their extraordinary ingenuity and inventiveness. Kipling has an Aesopian understanding of animals, of our dealings with them and our curious interrelatedness, interdependence, how we can learn about our own strange behaviour, our vanities and our foolishness, through them and through our relationship with them.” —Michael Morpurgo, The Guardian “It does for very little children much what the Jungle Books did for older ones. It is artfully artless, in its themes, in its repetitions, in its habitual limitation, and occasional abeyance, of adult humor. It strikes a child as the kind of yarn his father or uncle might have spun if he had just happened to think of it; and it has, like all good fairy-business, a sound core of philosophy.” —The Atlantic