I just received:

• The new paperback kids book adaptation of It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown. This one comes with a sheet of stickers, including 3 of Snoopy and 1 each of six other characters. It’s an okay adaptation as such things go; the even line weight and coloring used for foreground and background make it a little hard on the eyes. 24 pages.
• Where is Woodstock is a hardcover storybook about a Beagle Scout outing, with plastic three-dimensional birds build into the pages, and a pop-up at the end. They do make the effort to try to integrate gags from the strip into the book… which only reinforces my belief that kids books should actually reprint the strips. Solidly made.
• Snoopy at the Bat is a board book with a flat Snoopy figure on a spring on the front cover, so it wobbles a bit. The text is a poem of the kids playing baseball, a careful echoing of “Casey at the Bat” but without the ambition indicated by that poem. Because it’s a book for kids… it’s gotta have a happy ending. Because there’s no entertainmnet value in the Peanuts characters losing a game, right?

Now, the Easter Beagle bookthe Easter Beagle book is part of Amazon’s 4-for-3 promotion — if you buy four books in this promotion, the cheapest one is free. But are there other books in this promotion you’d want? Let me point you to the board book adaptation of A Charlie Brown Christmas, which is not only a 4-for-3 book but is also currently 53% off the cover price (not sure how long that discount will last, these high discounts can disappear suddenly.) Or the hardcover mini gift books of A Charlie Brown Christmas and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, which are each 43% off. Or use any of the dozens of regularly-priced Peanuts books or thousands of non-Peanuts books, CDs, and DVDs available as part of this promotion.

In other news: a paperback edition of the problematic biography Schulz and Peanuts will ship in October.

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