Harriet and William and the Terrible Creature

If you were to meet a dragonish thing eating rocks on a strange planet, it might not occur to you that what he needs is a flower garden. The Terrible Creature of this book is an unhappy soul who has to eat rocks because there is nothing left on his planet; Harriet (intrepid space traveller who has landed on his planet) has the idea of getting her green-fingered brother to a plant a flower garden for the creature. This book produced several unexpected 'readings' from my children. I thought it was a story about being kind, even to ugly beings, because 'even dragonish things must have feelings'. Several of the class thought that too; but several thought that it was about not wasting time helping people 'because he's only going to eat the flowers again so it wasn't worth the effort; and one small boy thought it about 'a real whimp. Why doesn't he just use his wings and fly somewhere else?' Neither reaction is likely to be what the author and her friends at the Princeton Centre for Energy and Environment Studies intended! A good book, nonetheless and with lovely illustrations and a lot to talk about, as you see.