Thew new Ready-to-Read Level 2 kids book Make a Trade, Charlie Brown! takes the run of strips where Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty trade players on their baseball teams and turns it into a prose-and-picture tale (not the first time that’s been done with this storyline… not even the first time under this title.) The book, with text by Tina Gallo and ably illustrated by my sometimes-collaborator Robert Pope, shows in some way the trickiness of making sure that Peanuts is accessible to today’s youth, in a couple of examples. In the text, we see Marcie telling Charlie Brown “I didn’t score a single goal” followed by the narration Charlie Brown doesn’t bother telling Marcie goals are in soccer, not baseball. That’s explaining the joke for kids, but almost certainly not in the terms that Schulz was thinking. Soccer was not appearing in the Peanuts strip at the time… and, in fact, was a much smaller thing among American kids than it is now. It wasn’t one of the games that Schulz played growing up. It’s much more likely he had hockey in mind. The problem with using an updated perspective is that it can mean not being true to Schulz.

In the art, we can see an example of going the other way, where being true to Schulz may make it hard to understand.

Are the kids today who are reading level 2 readers going to be able to recognize what that is Charlie Brown is holding? It’s a perfectly fine drawing of a tethered handset for a landline telephone as was standard for decades, but today’s seven year old will have been primarily exposed to cell phones and wireless phones. If it was held up to his head, then there’d be a bit more context to figure it out, and admittedly on the page before, there’s another character doing just that… but even so, I think this will take a little while for some readers to parse. I agree with the stance that Peanuts should stay in its (relatively loose) time period, but this is an example of where that has a price.

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