The Gruffalo's Child is a British children's picture book by writer and playwright Julia Donaldson, and illustrated by Axel Scheffler.

Eventually, concluding she has been tricked by the animals (and perhaps her father), she sadly decides that she "doesn't believe in the 'big bad mouse".

When she threatens to eat him, he cunningly invites her to meet the "big bad mouse", which he re-creates by using moonlight to project a tremendously enlarged and fearsome shadow to scare her away.

The story repeats the "brains over brawn" theme, the creatures, and the easily flowing rhyme scheme (tetrameter) of its predecessor, The Gruffalo.

"[1] According to a review in The Horn Book Magazine, "Scheffler's humorous, cartoonlike illustrations, which depict the Gruffalo and his child as more teddy-bear-like than monstrous, work well with Donaldson’s pleasingly repetitive text in rhyme to create a story that, like its small hero, is clever rather than truly scary.