The Gruffalo's Child is a follow up to the wonderful Gruffalo story, written in rhyming verse by Julia Donaldson with drawings by Axel Schaffer it tells the story of the Gruffalo's young daughter.

Hearing her father talk about the terrifying mouse who scared the Gruffalo so terribly, she sneaks out bored one night to find this awful creature, on her travels she meets the snake, the owl and the fox who all corroborate the Gruffalo's description of this frightening apparition, until eventually she meets her nemesis and the story takes an amusing twist.

This hardback book is 32 pages long, it contains 3 to 4 lines of rhyming verse on each page and is very easy to read, it requires the reader to use 7 different voices in total to cover the storyteller, the Gruffalo, the Gruffalo's child, the mouse, the fox, the owl and the snake.

The book looks great, the animations are detailed and incredibly evocative of the story, the story is easy to follow and simple, after reading it twice, you will know the story off by heart. It follows the same lines as the original book, but the drawings particularly of the Gruffalo and his little girl are great.

The book is in a nice format, big enough for your little one to hold and turn pages, but too robust for pages to be ripped or broken.

I would say this isn't in the same league as the original, it is lovely and easy to lose yourself in, but it really treads almost the same ground as the original story and the ending is a little more contrived than the first story. It is still enjoyable but you do feel like you have been here before.

The book is available on Amazon for £3.91 and is definitely worth it as a companion piece to the original or a bedtime story in its own right, I enjoy reading it and my little one enjoys hearing it, but its lack of originality is its only drawback, beautifully illustrated and well paced, occasionally you do feel like you have been here before.

I will give this 4 out of 5, its good value and good fun but doesn't live up to the standards set in the first book. You and your child have to have read the Gruffalo for this to really make sense, so I would recommend buying both together and then reading them consecutively to get the most out of this.