PIPPI GOES TO THE CIRCUS

Pippi Longstocking, the nine-year-old who lives by herself in her own house with her own horse and has inspired generations of children with her spunk and power, is shoehorned into an egregious picture-book length version of one of her adventures. The text is excerpted from two chapters of Pippi Longstocking, but it is surprising how flat it is out of context. Pippi’s neighbors Tommy and Annika invite Pippi to go to the circus with them, and she gets them all ringside seats with a gold piece from her suitcase. Irrepressible as always, Pippi leaps on the horse with the bareback rider, does wilder tricks than the tightrope walker, and bests the circus strongman at his own game. The ringmaster is horrified, but the crowd loves it, and Tommy and Annika think she is the best show of all. It ends rather abruptly with Pippi’s falling asleep in her seat. Chesworth imagines Pippi as a Howdy Doody look-alike, and, by depicting in detail all her stunts, shows how absurd they are outside the realm of the imagination. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and the Little House girls have also shown up in picture books, and so has Pippi (Pippi Longstocking’s After-Christmas Party, 1996), but this excerpt will not send readers back to Lindgren’s originals. (Picture book. 9-11)