Review - Children of the New Forest
Nov. 16th, 2009 02:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wilderthanWhen I first read this, I adored this and thought it was pretty much perfection. I read it over and over again, until the covers fell off my copy. I had that reaction to a lot of children's books, and I can't quite find the enchantment again in this one, which makes me sad. I decided to reread it after I came across a reference to it in one of the books I read for Introduction to Children's Literature.
It isn't really a very easily accessible text in some respects: rather biased, sometimes dry, rather didactic. Historical fiction is a turn-off in itself for some people. I remember being drawn in by the characters, though -- some of them are a little too good to be true, but Edward is at least a bit of an idiot sometimes, overly impetuous and jumping to conclusions. Alice and Edith are somewhat non-characters -- indeed, so is Patience, actually -- so I'm surprised I found so much to relate to, as a child. I suppose I didn't really care about whether the characters were male or female. Now I found the story surprisingly short on everything I was more interested in, in the later part of the book -- how exactly Edward gets on in the fighting, for example, and a more satisfying way of bringing all the characters together at the end. The ending paragraph or so is quite an irritating dry summary.
Still, there is still some of the magic in learning how they become so self-sufficient, in how clever Humphrey and Pablo are, and in the forest adventures. The stuff outside of the forest doesn't ring as true, though.
It isn't really a very easily accessible text in some respects: rather biased, sometimes dry, rather didactic. Historical fiction is a turn-off in itself for some people. I remember being drawn in by the characters, though -- some of them are a little too good to be true, but Edward is at least a bit of an idiot sometimes, overly impetuous and jumping to conclusions. Alice and Edith are somewhat non-characters -- indeed, so is Patience, actually -- so I'm surprised I found so much to relate to, as a child. I suppose I didn't really care about whether the characters were male or female. Now I found the story surprisingly short on everything I was more interested in, in the later part of the book -- how exactly Edward gets on in the fighting, for example, and a more satisfying way of bringing all the characters together at the end. The ending paragraph or so is quite an irritating dry summary.
Still, there is still some of the magic in learning how they become so self-sufficient, in how clever Humphrey and Pablo are, and in the forest adventures. The stuff outside of the forest doesn't ring as true, though.
