Reviews

There are certain things that a bear should just not be trusted with and the first one is plumbing. In fairness to Mr Curry, he only asked Paddington to fetch the plumber as he wasn't feeling too well, but when the plumber won't come because of an unpaid bill, Paddington decides to use the plumber's manual to try his paw at it instead. There is a disaster of only Paddington proportions! On the bright side, Paddington gets an invite to a ceremony at a marmalade factory. Things start to go wrong when he loses his invitation outside, gets mistaken for a new employee, and sets about his work with no idea what he is doing. A very sticky situation, especially when you have fur!

A second thing you should never do is mention a job that needs done in the house that you intend to do, and then leave Paddington alone in the house. Bears were not designed to be chimney sweeps as Mr Brown is about to find out to his cost. It serves the silly man right! If he had just went ahead and cleaned the chimney instead of moaning about it in front of the bear, none of it would've happened! Mr Gruber cheers Paddington up with a trip to the waxworks which gets off to a bad start due to Paddington's inability to tell real people from waxworks and it all goes downhill from there. Paddington is able to redeem himself by stepping in at the last minute when Mr Brown's cricket team is a man short. But Paddington has never played before and his pads are so big that he can hide behind them!

Surely a simple trip to the seaside can take place without any drama? Well, no, not when Paddington hears there is a £5 prize for identifying a local celebrity who is somewhere in the area. When the bear thinks he has found his man, nothing is going to persuade him that he might have it wrong! A party gives Paddington the chance to entertain his trader friends from the market, torment Mr Curry and get a big surprise!

I really enjoy Paddington's relationship with the Brown family and they are good characters in their own right. My favourite is Mrs Bird the housekeeper, the only one who is often in tune with what might be going on in Paddington's mind! Mr Brown is somewhat hapless and you'd think after the decorating fiasco, he'd make sure that there was no invitation to the bear to do it himself...

neilrcoulter's review against another edition

Go to review page

3.0

We love Paddington, but this collection of stories kind of fell flat. The book has the usual assortment of topics: a Mr. Curry story, a Mr. Gruber story, Paddington doing something wrong at home, Paddington doing something wrong at a family outing, etc. But for some reason these stories didn't reach nearly the level of hilarity of some of the other books. The final chapter, "An Unexpected Party," is especially disappointing, as it is just a different take on one of our very favorite stories from an earlier book, in which Paddington entertains his birthday party guests with his new "conjurer's outfit." The chapter in this book is nearly identical, but not as funny; and it seems unnecessarily mean-spirited towards Mr. Curry this time around.