I only read two stories from Just So Stories, "How the First Letter was Written" and "How the Alphabet was Made." Both were incredibly fun to read, especially aloud. Kipling pokes fun at the stereotypes of parents and children with names like, "Lady-who-asks-a-very-many-questions" for the mother and "Small-person-with-out-any-manners-who-ought-to-be-spanked" for the child. In both stories the theme is the need for better communication skills and are meant to be read together. The first letter makes up the alphabet later on and one story is a continuation of the other. Rumor has it that both "How the First Letter was Written" and "How the Alphabet was Made" started out as oral stories, told to Kipling's daughter Josephine in 1900. ( )

Children's stories, published in 1902, that provide fantasy explanations for the origin of things - animal features, writing etc. Famous as children's stories, they also provide the epithet for tendentious evolutionary reasoning. Interesting. Also my first book read on the lap-top from a Project Gutenburg text. On-screen reading is not as easy as it should seem! Read March 2009 ( )

Delightful, whimsical stories about how the world began. LOVED reading this stories just before bedtime, pretending I was a little kid again... ( )

I enjoyed reading these stories very much. Most of the stories tell tales about how an animal got certain physical characteristics. Some of the later stories are about humans. The stories made me smile and I think that reading these with children will cause a lot of laughter. At the same time reading these made me wonder if the stories are still readable for little children, but maybe some of the words look a lot more complicated to me because I'm not a native English speaker. Some of the steoreotypes expressed in this book seemed old and are 'wrong' to our modern standards. I can appreciate that that might be because of the times in which they were written, however.
Overall I think I enjoyed 'The Elephant's Child' best. ( )

Beautiful and wonderful. Works of genius by a man who freed himself enough that he could give himself up to that genius instead of trying to make sure that it came out perfectly. As pleasing as his other works are, none I've read can match the joy, humor, simplicity, and odd truth of these.

Like children's literature should be, these stories never lose their humor or punch. Despite some redundancy with actual myths and some cases of artificially lowering complexity for children and hence growing transparent, eminently enjoyable. ( )