I sadly actually want to get all of the biographies of Charles Schulz aimed at children. These things, almost always issued as part of a large set of biographies aimed to fill library space and be the easiest thing to write a book review about, tend to be expensive, and the only real joy is when they’re bad on some level. They’re too short to ever be great.

The latest one of these is part of the Amazing Authors subset of the  Zoom in On set of biographies published by Abdo. Written by Jennifer Strand, the body of the biography clocks in at a lush 25 short sentences. It is not bad on the level the enjoyable bad ones get to be. There is an arguable point (was “Peanuts” a renaming of “Li’l Folks” as this states, or by the time you switch from a single panel gag series without continuing characters to a four-panel strip with continuing characters and a different name, do you have a different feature?), one imprecise statement (Peanuts “was also a musical play”; I’m pretty sure most of my audience here could name ”two” musical plays derived from the strip), and with almost every page having an image, they sometimes went with the picture they could get rather than something relevant (the background to a page talking about “Li’l Folks” is a shot of a museum wall with a late-in-the-run “Peanuts” Sunday strip on the wall.) But there’s none of the egregious turning-Schulz’s-two-wives-into-one-woman, misspelling-name-on-cover, drawing-of-Schulz-in-skyscraper-that-has-doors-to-the-outside-on-a-high-floor badness that I use to justify having spent hundreds of dollars on these dang things over the years.

Selling for about 50% more than a volume of Complete Peanuts through Amazon, you don’t need this… unless you’ve already got all of the rest of these things that you could find. If, like me, you have that disease, then here’s another one for you!

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