Book Review: Giant

Giant by Judith McQuoid (Little Island Books, 2025).

It’s 1908 in Belfast, Ireland, and young Davy is going to work with his mother, hoping to earn a little extra for the family coffers. With his father ailing and unable to work as much as he used to, they need every penny they can get. But Davy’s new work turns out to be nothing like he expected. The kindly lady for whom his mother does housekeeping, Mrs. Lewis, doesn’t need him to do chores. She’d rather have him play with her young son, known as Jacks, who’s been missing his brother at boarding school.

As all good C. S. Lewis fans will have discerned by now, Giant by Judith McQuoid is a novel about the great writer’s childhood. Though Davy and his family are fictional, they’re woven seamlessly into this engaging tale of the ten-year-old Lewis. The novel is targeted at middle-grade readers, but it’s written with enough imagination and heart to draw in teen and adult readers as well.

Young Jacks welcomes Davy into his world of books, art, and nature, and Davy is surprised to find himself loving it. He’s had little time or encouragement to purse such interests until now, but with help from his new friend, he starts seeing the world around him in a new way, and developing his own talent for drawing. Davy’s mother, however, is more alarmed than pleased by this. She’s afraid that pursuing anything but a steady job in the local shipyard will lead him to disappointment, pain, and poverty.

“We’re very different from the Lewis family,” she explains to him. “We can’t afford to be thinking about drawing and the like. … We don’t take risks, Davy. We just keep working.”

As these strictures begin to affect the boys’ friendship, Jacks gains a new understanding of what life is like for families who have less than his own. At the same time, Davy has to do his best to see Jacks through the greatest loss of his young life. Despite their very different backgrounds and situations in life, it grows more and more evident that each has something priceless to offer the other.

McQuoid tells this story with gentleness and compassion. There are no villains here (aside from the abusive schoolmaster Jacks will eventually face). Davy’s discouraging mother and Jacks’s sometimes inattentive father aren’t portrayed as malicious, only worn down by worry and unable to see past their pressing circumstances.

It’s a tribute to their respective sons’ loyalty and resourcefulness that the two families finally begin, though slowly and imperfectly, to transcend those circumstances. And it’s a tribute to McQuoid’s talent that, although her story of C. S. Lewis isn’t a true one, it feels very much like one.

(Cover image copyright Little Island Books.)

Book Links:

Giant on Amazon
Giant on Bookshop

(Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualified purchases.)

Goodreads Links:

Gabriële by Anne Berest and Claire Berest
All Kneeling by Anne Parrish