As I’ve discussed before, it’s tough to make a good Peanuts prose book, because the humor of the strip is so grounded in the visuals and the rhythm they create. And the humor is so internal. Well, I’ve found a book that does the best job yet of making it work. It’s Your Year, Charlie Brown takes the smart move of being Charlie Brown’s journal for a year. That means that the whole thing has a point of view, and isn’t just a narration of events. The story bits are all taken from stories from the strip, with some attempt to play them into a larger narrative. There are black and white images on most pages, taken from the strip. Anyway, big points to Sally Morgan, who wrote this thing.

This is a British book published by Scholastic, but with no US edition yet in sight. But you can get it fairly quieckly, with free shipping and a discounted price, from BookDepository. As it happens, Scholastic is following this up with issuing a Charlie Brown journal, presumably just like the one Charlie Brown used to write this.

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