Catching up on reviewing some of the recently arrived Peanuts books:

• Go Fly a Kite, Charlie Brown (not to be confused with the soon-to-be-reprinted strip collection of the same name) and Snoopy Takes Off! do a perfectly fine job of being what they are, which is cheap storybooks. The art is well-drawn. As with many such things, the need to provide text for kids to read means that some of the impact is lost – having text explain that Snoopy realizes that he cannot climb the tree (in an attempt to rescue Linus’s blanket from the kite-eating tree) does not have the simply impact of showing him climbing halfway up and falling down. Doing it in both text and image just slows up the reading, blunts the effect. So if you want to expose your kids to pure Schulz brilliance, show them or read to them a strip collection… but these are perfectly suitable things to throw in the back seat for the kids to read while you’re driving to the store. I do kind of wish they’ just blow up some strips and use this format to reprint strip storylines in handy, $3.99 disposable packages. (They do nicely put one strip on the back of each volume… but remove the first panel from each.) For some reason, the Snoopy one credits the writer first, then the artist (“Adapted by Tina Gallo, Illustrated by Scott Jeralds”) while the Charlie Brown book goes the other way ’round (“Illustrated by Will Yak, story adapted by Cordelia Evans”) – that’s the sort of inconsistency that just messes with something in my writer/editor/publisher brain.
• Meet the Peanuts Gang (also not to be confused with the strip reprint of the same name) is actually pretty nice. This 96 page paperback introduces the various Peanuts characters with text descriptions, trivia, and example strips. There’s quotes from the characters, quotes from Schulz, some have little shots of how the character evolved over the years. I could definitely see a kid hunkering down with this and draining it of all its information. A small round of applause for Natalie Shaw, who “adapted” this book.

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