"Read all about it! Read all about it!"
That's roughly how this audiobook opens - a Victorian newspaper hawker shouting about a woolly mammoth discovered frozen in Arctic ice - and I'll be honest, I was grinning within thirty seconds. I'd queued this up on a Saturday morning while Denise was still asleep, coffee in hand, grading pile deliberately ignored on the kitchen table. I expected a light palate cleanser after a brutal week of convincing juniors that yes, Great Expectations is worth finishing. What I got was five hours and forty-one minutes of something far more joyful than I had any right to expect from a children's book about a street orphan and a defrosted mammoth.
Dickens With a Whoopee Cushion
Let's talk about what David Walliams is really doing here, because it's cleverer than it first appears. Elsie is a ten-year-old orphan in Victorian London - ragged, hungry, sleeping rough. The workhouse conditions she endures are genuinely harsh, described with enough grit that you feel the cold and the cruelty. This is Dickensian setup, full stop. But Walliams doesn't let the misery curdle. He layers absurdist humor and warmth over the suffering in a way that reminded me - and I don't say this lightly - of Roald Dahl's best instincts. The scatological jokes are there (my students would love this; my department chair would raise an eyebrow), but they're never mean-spirited. They're a kid's defense mechanism against a world that's genuinely unkind. And the mammoth - Woolly, as Elsie names her - becomes this enormous, lumbering symbol of tenderness in a story that earns its emotional beats rather than demanding them.
If you loved Oliver Twist but wished it had more mammoth stampedes through the Natural History Museum, this is your book. I'm not joking. That's basically the pitch.
A Cast That Turns Pages Into Stage
Here's where the audiobook earns its keep. This isn't a single narrator reading a children's story. This is an ensemble production - Jane Horrocks, Miriam Margolyes, Peter Serafinowicz, Nitin Ganatra, James Goode, and Walliams himself all rotating through. The effect is theatrical in the truest sense. It feels like you're sitting in a West End matinee rather than listening to someone read aloud.
Walliams narrates with this melodramatic weeping quality that somehow works - he plays the sentiment big and broad, leaning into the comedy of his own emotional excess, and it gives the whole production a winking self-awareness. He knows he's being ridiculous. You know he knows. And somehow that makes the genuinely tender moments land harder. Margolyes, predictably, is a force of nature - she brings a physicality to her voice work that you can practically see. And the comedic timing across the cast is sharp. Pauses land where they should. The narrator understands that pause is punctuation - and this ensemble treats every beat like a punchline or a heartbreak, whichever the moment demands.
I don't have enough detail to tell you exactly who voices which character (the research was thin on that front), but the multi-narrator approach creates instant texture. You're never confused about who's speaking, and each voice carries its own energy.
Who Gets a Ticket and Who Sits This One Out
This is a children's book. Let's be clear about that. The prose is direct, the jokes are broad, and the plot moves at a pace that respects a young attention span. If you're looking for literary complexity, you won't find it here. My students would probably call this "actually fun," which is the highest compliment they know how to give.
But here's the thing - I found myself genuinely moved by the relationship between Elsie and Woolly. There's a scene where the mammoth is being paraded through London, confused and frightened, and Elsie's instinct to protect this creature ten thousand years older than her hit me somewhere unexpected. Parents listening alongside their kids will feel it too. One listener put it perfectly: "I think I enjoyed listening to it even more than they did."
Families on road trips? Absolutely. Kids who think reading is boring? Hand them this. Adults who need five hours of uncomplicated joy? Right here. But if scatological humor makes you wince, or if you need your historical fiction to be rigorous about, say, the actual timeline of Victorian paleontology - maybe pass.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For
At five hours and forty-one minutes, this is a quick listen - almost too quick for a credit, honestly. But the ensemble production elevates it well beyond a standard children's audiobook. It's warm, it's funny, it's got just enough Dickensian grit to give it weight, and the cast performs it like they're having the time of their lives. I listened at 1.0x because - even in a kids' book - the comedic timing deserves its full rhythm.
Would I assign this to my sophomores? No. Would I recommend it to the colleague who complains she never has time to read anymore? In a heartbeat. Sometimes the best thing you can listen to is something that reminds you why stories exist in the first place: to make you feel less alone in a cold world. I stumbled onto something similar — that quality of pure narrative warmth that strips away all the adult noise — when I reviewed Fairy Tales and Stories, though I'll admit Walliams delivers the emotional gut-punch with considerably more mammoth stampedes. Even if your companion is a woolly mammoth.
