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cherrycicada 's review for:
Five Little Peppers And How They Grew
by Margaret Sidney
I'm not having very good luck reading my favorite books from childhood lately. This one was lovely during about the first half, but then it became dreadfully boring during the second half.
The five little Peppers are 5 poor brothers and sisters ranging in ages 4-9 who live with their widowed (we assume) mother in late 1800s America. For some reason that I don't quite grasp, Polly, the 9-year-old, seems to be all the children's mother of choice. It's implied that the 8-year-old works for a living. And the 4-year old runs off with an organ grinder and his monkey and then gets lost again wandering off to the post office by herself. The interesting thing is that the 4-year-old is never admonished not to run off alone or with strangers after these incidents. Instead, the blame is placed on people not watching her. I'm guessing that she must get full-out kidnapped in future books since they've never bothered to talk with her about what she's been doing wrong. It really would serve them right.
To be fair, this is probably a more enjoyable read for a child who isn't analyzing the storyline from the viewpoint of being a mother. It is definitely a great book for children to become acquainted with what it's like for children who grow up so poor that they've never even had a Christmas. And there are parts of the story that I remember fondly from childhood like the hard-of-hearing grandmother, the thrill of having raisins for a cake, decorating a Christmas tree with strings of popcorn (which I insisted that we do the first time I read this as a child), and the organ grinder's little monkey. All of these are in the first half of the book, of course. I'd give 5 stars for the first half of the book and 2 stars for the last half of the book, averaging it out to a nice 3.5 stars, rounded down to 3.
The five little Peppers are 5 poor brothers and sisters ranging in ages 4-9 who live with their widowed (we assume) mother in late 1800s America. For some reason that I don't quite grasp, Polly, the 9-year-old, seems to be all the children's mother of choice. It's implied that the 8-year-old works for a living. And the 4-year old runs off with an organ grinder and his monkey and then gets lost again wandering off to the post office by herself. The interesting thing is that the 4-year-old is never admonished not to run off alone or with strangers after these incidents. Instead, the blame is placed on people not watching her. I'm guessing that she must get full-out kidnapped in future books since they've never bothered to talk with her about what she's been doing wrong. It really would serve them right.
To be fair, this is probably a more enjoyable read for a child who isn't analyzing the storyline from the viewpoint of being a mother. It is definitely a great book for children to become acquainted with what it's like for children who grow up so poor that they've never even had a Christmas. And there are parts of the story that I remember fondly from childhood like the hard-of-hearing grandmother, the thrill of having raisins for a cake, decorating a Christmas tree with strings of popcorn (which I insisted that we do the first time I read this as a child), and the organ grinder's little monkey. All of these are in the first half of the book, of course. I'd give 5 stars for the first half of the book and 2 stars for the last half of the book, averaging it out to a nice 3.5 stars, rounded down to 3.