It's Time for School, Charlie Brown (Peanuts)

Rating:
Summary: True, but not quite.
Review: I don't think that Charles Schultz would be very pleased right now. Someone is taking his beloved Peanuts and making products just to make money. I love the Peanuts and I love Charlie Brown and when I saw this book in a department store, I thought, "Great, a new Charlie Brown book." Well, this book isn't quite the nut it's cracked up to be. Charlie Brown enters a spelling bee against the protests of his friends. He really thinks he can win, but when he finally gets his moment to shine, he messes up big time. The book ends by basically saying things are hopeless for Charlie. The ending is what really bothered me. Yes, Charlie Brown is a lovable loser, but even when he loses there's always some catharsis; he usually thinks about his loss or talks about it with Linus and the story ends on a note of positivity. Not so here. Peanuts fans are the only people I recommend this book for.

Rating:
Summary: Do we really want to discourage kids like this?
Review: I love Snoopy; I loved Charles Schulz's comics. But this book is disappointing in its negative message - it goes too far with the "Charlie Brown is a loser" message - Charlie Brown's friends all laugh at him when he insists it's good to keep trying (I agree with Charlie Brown - making a mistake or not winning shouldn't be a signal to just give up and never try anything ever again) and he enters the spelling bee. There are no guarantees that something attempted after a failure will end in a success, but Charlie Brown's failure in the spelling bee isn't funny - nor is the way his friends make fun of him - nor is the general message of his "loser" status: it's completely depressing and the book ends with no hope whatsoever for Charlie Brown to be anything other than a loser... I don't want kids to get the message that if they make a mistake, if they don't win, then they're doomed to failure and no friends for the rest of their lives, do you?

Rating:
Summary: Good Grief! Are Charlie Brown books really a bad thing?
Review: It is certainly interesting to find a controversial "Peanuts" book, but that is clearly the case for "It's Time for School, Charlie Brown." The situation is that school is about to start and now Charlie Brown, in addition to worry about not being able to kick a football, pitch a baseball, or fly a kite, now has school to worry about as well. After talking to Linus and consulting Lucy at her psychiatric help booth, Charlie Brown almost starts to feel better about school. Once there he learns that there is a citywide spelling bee. However, there are a couple of problems in that Charlie Brown's arm will not go up (apparently it is smarter than he is) and his friends (that is to say, Lucy) predict disaster. Since this is Charlie Brown that is indeed will happen, except that young readers will probably have no clue as to why Charlie Brown spells the word he spells the way that he spells it, and telling them that Charles M. Schulz lived in the San Francisco Bay area might not be enough of a hint (here is another clue: Who is the godfather of baseball player Barry Bonds?).

Besides getting the joke the other thing that long time readers of "Peanuts" will realize is that "It's Time for School, Charlie Brown" is based on a series of comic strips that Schulz did way back when. The story is adapted by Judy Katschke and the art by Peter and Nick LoBianco, but this is Ready-to-Read volume is essentially distilled from a couple of weeks worth of comic strips and not an original story. Consequently, the blame for overdoing the loveable loser bit would fall to Schulz and not to the people who put this book together. You can find the same theme in "Kick the Football, Charlie Brown!", a companion volume to this one. If you want to make the argument that Schulz goes overboard on Charlie Brown being a loser, then it is going to have to be based on more than just this one example, which, after all, does accurately reflect his original story.

As for constituting cheap commercial exploitation of the "Peanuts" gang I think that using these beloved characters for a series of Ready-to-Read books is laudable. These are Level 2 books, which means they emphasize reading independently while providing more-complex stories and varied sentence structure. I would contend Charlie Brown and the rest are perfectly suited to this task and that the way these "Peanuts" books combine a series of Schulz's original strips into a coherent story is a nice way of providing an inherent sense of structure without having specific chapters. By biggest complaint about this particular effort is that the key joke is not going to make any sense to young readers and that explaining it takes away from the joy of reading this book as well.

Rating:
Summary: Good Grief! Are Charlie Brown books really a bad thing?
Review: It is certainly interesting to find a controversial "Peanuts" book, but that is clearly the case for "It's Time for School, Charlie Brown." The situation is that school is about to start and now Charlie Brown, in addition to worry about not being able to kick a football, pitch a baseball, or fly a kite, now has school to worry about as well. After talking to Linus and consulting Lucy at her psychiatric help booth, Charlie Brown almost starts to feel better about school. Once there he learns that there is a citywide spelling bee. However, there are a couple of problems in that Charlie Brown's arm will not go up (apparently it is smarter than he is) and his friends (that is to say, Lucy) predict disaster. Since this is Charlie Brown that is indeed will happen, except that young readers will probably have no clue as to why Charlie Brown spells the word he spells the way that he spells it, and telling them that Charles M. Schulz lived in the San Francisco Bay area might not be enough of a hint (here is another clue: Who is the godfather of baseball player Barry Bonds?).

Besides getting the joke the other thing that long time readers of "Peanuts" will realize is that "It's Time for School, Charlie Brown" is based on a series of comic strips that Schulz did way back when. The story is adapted by Judy Katschke and the art by Peter and Nick LoBianco, but this is Ready-to-Read volume is essentially distilled from a couple of weeks worth of comic strips and not an original story. Consequently, the blame for overdoing the loveable loser bit would fall to Schulz and not to the people who put this book together. You can find the same theme in "Kick the Football, Charlie Brown!", a companion volume to this one. If you want to make the argument that Schulz goes overboard on Charlie Brown being a loser, then it is going to have to be based on more than just this one example, which, after all, does accurately reflect his original story.

As for constituting cheap commercial exploitation of the "Peanuts" gang I think that using these beloved characters for a series of Ready-to-Read books is laudable. These are Level 2 books, which means they emphasize reading independently while providing more-complex stories and varied sentence structure. I would contend Charlie Brown and the rest are perfectly suited to this task and that the way these "Peanuts" books combine a series of Schulz's original strips into a coherent story is a nice way of providing an inherent sense of structure without having specific chapters. By biggest complaint about this particular effort is that the key joke is not going to make any sense to young readers and that explaining it takes away from the joy of reading this book as well.