Happy Little Family

I loved the little family

ISBN 044040164X - This book seems to me to suffer from a split personality. Outside, it's a mid-sized paperback like all others for the pre-teen set. On the back, it says ages 8-12 and it's 116 pages long. Open it up and you'll find that the font is a little larger than the average book for this age set. The language is somewhat simpler and the chapters are more a series of individual stories, rather than a flowing chapter book. Bonnie is little. Not just little, but the littlest, and in a family with five children being little is sometimes hard. Everyone else gets to skate, but Bonnie is left behind because it's so cold. Debbie and Emmy get real hats, but Bonnie gets a sunbonnet. All the children have arrowhead collections, but Bonnie hasn't ever found even one. And when Bonnie asserts her independence, demanding to take a different route to a friend's house than everyone else, things don't go as smoothly as she hoped. A very cute series of stories with nice illustrations by Decie Merwin, Happy Little Family would impress me more if each story had been a separate book and had been marketed as read-aloud books to the 4-8 age group that it's more appropriate to. Still, nicely done stories worth picking up even 60 years later.

This was a good book, and it is easy enough for younger children to understand when you read it to them. For on-their-own-reading, it would be in my opinion, for ages 8-9. Personally, my favorite story was the family contest, in which each child had to perform an act of bravery, I think bravery, anyway, it showed the readers, or listeners, good acts to do, and it showed with a good act, comes a wonderful reward.

This is a charming tale of a family with five children living in Kentucky in the early 1900s. The story is told through the eyes of four-year-old Bonnie. Her understanding father helps her through frustrations in trying to keep up with her older siblings. The simple stories contain truths that will be appreciated by very young children. In one example, the father announces that the child who shows wisdom and bravery will be awarded a special arrowhead that he found. Each child shares stories of acts of courage until one really stands out. My four and six year old girls really enjoyed this as a read-aloud and my eight devoured it eagerly on his own (and he can be hard to find books for at this stage). We're looking forward to reading the other three titles in the series - Schoolhouse in the Woods, Up and Down the River and Schoolhouse in the Parlor - due to be republished soon.