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A review by xterminal
The Friendly Book (Big Little Golden Book) by Margaret Wise Brown
2.0
Margaret Wise Brown, The Friendly Book (Golden Press, 1954)
The farther I get outside the Goodnight Moon circle of Margaret Wise Brown books, the more I understand that saying about lightning never striking twice. The Friendly Book is the weakest book the Brown corpus we've encountered so far. It seems to be an attempt at poetry. To Brown's credit, the structure of most of the pieces of the book is the same, though that structure is very flawed; the first half of each poem (each of which is title “I Like _____”, with a different fitb for each) is a simple list of things, while the second is a quatrain that actually approaches verse. Had the whole book resembled those second halves, this might at least be half-decent. On the other hand, it isn't, and it isn't, respectively. **
The farther I get outside the Goodnight Moon circle of Margaret Wise Brown books, the more I understand that saying about lightning never striking twice. The Friendly Book is the weakest book the Brown corpus we've encountered so far. It seems to be an attempt at poetry. To Brown's credit, the structure of most of the pieces of the book is the same, though that structure is very flawed; the first half of each poem (each of which is title “I Like _____”, with a different fitb for each) is a simple list of things, while the second is a quatrain that actually approaches verse. Had the whole book resembled those second halves, this might at least be half-decent. On the other hand, it isn't, and it isn't, respectively. **