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SallyT
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Tracy, I just finished writing an essay on Swallows and Amazons, on exactly the themes you articulate! We love those books (I'm reading We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, my personal favorite, to my 8yo right now). All the fiddling about does get tedious, and the dialogue drives my husband insane for some reason -- I guess because it's largely so neither-here-nor-there, and so much about sailing -- but I think they're worth hanging in there for, if for nothing else than to give children an imaginative vision of what childhood can be like.
I don't think the camping-and-sailing-alone business -- which might have been a stretch for the average 1930s child, too -- is as important as the idea of entrusting children with free time and their own imaginations, which I think our culture does NOT do. If your kids are camping in the back yard, then they're doing what that book is about, and what they're doing is bound to be larger in their own minds than it looks (just as the lake, the islands, and the shores are a much larger world in the minds of the Swallows).
I wasn't nuts about Milly-Molly-Mandy, either -- I got tired of reading the phrase "little-friend-Susan" over and over, and found the language kind of . . . condescending to children. I don't remember my children disliking it, but I didn't much enjoy it as a read-aloud.
And it has been my great disappointment that none of my children has devoured horse stories the way I did -- but then, they're not begging me for a horse, either, so maybe that's not such a bad thing!
Sally
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JennGM
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We are reading Five Little Peppers right now. Reading it aloud is tedious to me, but the boys are enjoying it.
Milly-Molly didn't flow either as a read-aloud, but my boys thought it was funny, especially with the repetition and how she said "Muvver" and "Favver".
I am cheating on the Swallows series, as I purchased the audio book. I just knew I couldn't read it aloud. It's better hearing a British man read it.  Oh, and we don't camp or sail.
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MaryMary
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My children moaned audibly when we would read The Cat of Bubastes. We probably read halfway through and then dropped it,so united we're my children in their dislike! I also had a hard time with Milly Molly Mandy. And we were gifted a boxed set of The Borrowers series from a friend who couldn't wait to get rid of them! LOL! We haven't read them ourselves after that kind of review! 
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CrunchyMom
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JennGM wrote:
We are reading Five Little Peppers right now. Reading it aloud is tedious to me, but the boys are enjoying it.
Milly-Molly didn't flow either as a read-aloud, but my boys thought it was funny, especially with the repetition and how she said "Muvver" and "Favver".
I am cheating on the Swallows series, as I purchased the audio book. I just knew I couldn't read it aloud. It's better hearing a British man read it. Oh, and we don't camp or sail. |
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We did Five Little Peppers as an audio from the library, and I think that books with lots of "voices" to lend themselves to a professional reader.
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JodieLyn
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It is h.a.r.d. to read with consistent multiple voices. I've done it with Narnia and Harry Potter (earlier books).. *whew* that was work but also so fun.
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TracyFD
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Do we have a thread on books that are better on audio?
Sally - great point! Free time + imagination is really the main idea. Kids can go anywhere and do anything with it!
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Mrs. B
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DianaC wrote:
| We couldn't get through Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. It seems to be on so many reading lists that I expected it to be great. Would it have gotten any better if we continued? |
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NO, it wouldn't! That is one book I couldn't stand stand to even listen to-let alone read out loud, but my older child just loved them so we used libravox recordings for her. She also loved the bobsy twins and that's another series I couldn't read aloud.
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Angie Mc
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Swiss Family Robinson.
Father.
Yikes.
Love,
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Karen T
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SallyT wrote:
We adore LM Boston's The Children of Green Knowe, but have not liked subsequent books in that series nearly so much.
Sally
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I only just heard about these books - we saw the movie From Time to Time last week on Netflix streaming, and it's based on one of the Green Knowe books, so I went looking for them. The movie was very good, though there are a few startling scenes which might scare younger children. Maggie Smith and Timothy Spall are both in it.
Karen
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SallyT
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Oh, I didn't know about that movie. The book is very gentle -- even the scary scene is fairly muted and dreamlike (as I recall -- it's been several years since we last read it). Mostly it's just beautiful, especially the relationship between the little boy and his great-grandmother.
The books are based on an actual house and garden, dating from the 11th century, at a place called Hemingford Gray, on the River Ouse in England. A friend in Cambridge had told us about both the house and the books, but we didn't visit the house until the last year we lived there, on a boat trip we took down the Ouse. Then when we came back to the US, we found the first book, which took us right back! The river and its floods are very much a part of life in that part of England, and they figure significantly in the book.
Anyway, that is an enduring favorite of ours.
Sally
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4Real Forums : Living Literature
Topic: Books you didn't like
