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A review by rickburner
Stuart Little by E.B. White
3.0
Kid lit jazz, for better or worse.
A curious little book that, today, seems an unlikely candidate for a classic of children's literature. Stuart Little is a series of vignettes, starting from the high premise of a mouse who is a child of a human family. The first paces are what you'd expect: Stuart can fit down the drain, sleeps in a cigarette box, and has a tense relationship with the family cat. His size enables some local adventures before the main narrative thread begins - Stuart's relationship with and quest for the bird Margalo. Even then, Stuart spends as much time in unrelated interludes as he does on his journey.
The result is a feel of jazz-like noodling, as White riffs and elaborates on the book's premise. This is underscored by the book's playfulness (culminating in a miniature, fully-functional car with an invisibility button), droll conversational tone, and Stuart's self-serious attitude. And like many a jazz performance, it ends abruptly, with Stuart driving off into the New York countryside after a philosophical rumination on travel with a telephone lineman. We never learn if he finds Margalo.
Whether today's readers will enjoy the book depends on their openness to this improvisational form and tone. It's an imaginative, trope-defining book, and its vignetted style make it great for bedtime reading. But the lack of a clear narrative arc, moral reward, or outright hilarity makes it a likely head-scratcher for today's family readers.
A curious little book that, today, seems an unlikely candidate for a classic of children's literature. Stuart Little is a series of vignettes, starting from the high premise of a mouse who is a child of a human family. The first paces are what you'd expect: Stuart can fit down the drain, sleeps in a cigarette box, and has a tense relationship with the family cat. His size enables some local adventures before the main narrative thread begins - Stuart's relationship with and quest for the bird Margalo. Even then, Stuart spends as much time in unrelated interludes as he does on his journey.
The result is a feel of jazz-like noodling, as White riffs and elaborates on the book's premise. This is underscored by the book's playfulness (culminating in a miniature, fully-functional car with an invisibility button), droll conversational tone, and Stuart's self-serious attitude. And like many a jazz performance, it ends abruptly, with Stuart driving off into the New York countryside after a philosophical rumination on travel with a telephone lineman. We never learn if he finds Margalo.
Whether today's readers will enjoy the book depends on their openness to this improvisational form and tone. It's an imaginative, trope-defining book, and its vignetted style make it great for bedtime reading. But the lack of a clear narrative arc, moral reward, or outright hilarity makes it a likely head-scratcher for today's family readers.