The Jungle Book

About This Book

The Jungle Book is not one long story but a collection of seven separate tales, each set somewhere in the world of animals and the people who live alongside them. Three of the tales follow Mowgli, a human boy who toddles into a wolf's cave one warm night in the Seeonee hills of central India and is raised by the wolf pack as one of their own cubs. In that jungle, every creature lives under a strict set of rules called the Law of the Jungle, and Mowgli must learn it word by word from a solemn old bear named Baloo and a black panther named Bagheera. The other four tales travel far from the Seeonee hills. One follows a fur seal born with a white coat on a foggy island in the Bering Sea, who begins asking questions the older seals would rather not answer. Another takes place inside the walls of an Indian garden, where a young mongoose declares war on the cobras who live in the grass. A third follows a ten-year-old elephant driver's son who longs to see something no person has ever seen, and the last is a nighttime conversation among army animals in a rain-soaked military camp. What holds the seven stories together is a single question asked seven different ways: what does it take to belong somewhere, and what happens to a creature who does not quite fit? Kipling gives his animals voices, opinions, manners, and arguments, and he expects readers to take them seriously. Between the stories he places short songs and poems, sung by the wolves, the seals, the monkeys, and the camp animals, that echo the tale just told.

Fifth-grade readers meet a main character who is almost exactly their age and who spends the whole book being told he does not belong — first because he is a human among animals, and later because he seems too much like an animal to be a human. That is a feeling most ten- and eleven-year-olds recognize, and Kipling takes it seriously rather than smoothing it over. The book also rewards close reading in a way short stories rarely do: because it is built from seven separate tales, students can compare how the same big ideas about rules, courage, and belonging get tested in a jungle, on a beach, in a garden, and in an army camp. And the language itself is a workout — Kipling's animals speak formally and use words worth collecting, which makes this an unusually rich book for building vocabulary.

Pre-Reading Discussion Questions

1. What does the word 'family' mean to you — does it have to mean people you are related to?
2. Every group you belong to has rules, some written down and some not. Think of one group you are part of and name a rule nobody ever says out loud.
3. If you were raised by animals instead of people, what do you think you would be good at, and what would you never learn?
4. Is it braver to fight something bigger than you, or to walk away from a fight you could win? Explain your thinking.
5. When a group decides someone does not belong, what usually causes that — something the person did, or something about who they are?
6. Authors sometimes give animals human voices and opinions. What can a writer say through a talking animal that would be harder to say through a human character?

Themes & Big Ideas to Track

• The Law of the Jungle is presented as a practical code that exists for a reason, not just a list of commands — watch for the moments when a character explains why a rule exists.
• Almost every story features a character who is caught between two worlds and belongs completely to neither one.
• Kipling repeatedly contrasts groups that have rules and memory with groups that have neither, and he treats that difference as the real measure of a community.
• Courage in this book is rarely about size or strength; watch how often the smallest character in a scene is the one who acts.
• Teachers and mentors appear in every tale, and the book keeps asking what a student owes the person who taught them.
• The stories are set in a world shaped by the British Empire, so pay attention to who gives orders, who obeys, and how the narrator describes people of different backgrounds.

Chapter-by-Chapter Study Guide

About the Author

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, in 1865, to English parents, and he spent his earliest years surrounded by the sounds, languages, and animals of the city before being sent to school in England at the age of five. He returned to India as a young man and worked as a newspaper reporter, writing poems and short stories in his spare time that quickly made him famous. He wrote The Jungle Book in 1894 while living in Vermont, in the United States, partly as stories for his young daughter. In 1907 he became the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he remains the youngest person ever to win it. He died in 1936, leaving behind Kim, Just So Stories, Captains Courageous, and hundreds of poems.

The Jungle Book was published in 1894, when India was governed by Britain and Kipling was one of the most widely read writers in the English-speaking world. That setting shows up everywhere in the book: British officers appear in the elephant and army-camp stories, the seal story turns on the international fur trade of the 1800s, and Kipling frequently sorts characters by rank, caste, and nation in ways that reflect the attitudes of the empire he grew up in. Modern readers can enjoy his storytelling and still notice, and question, the assumptions underneath it — especially where he describes Indian villagers, Aleut hunters, or Afghan visitors. Reading the book this way is part of the work: appreciating what a writer did well while thinking carefully about what he got wrong.