I got in my copy of The Great American Story of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the Peanuts Gang!, which is a Ready-to-Read Level Three book that basically fills the same function as the Schulz biographies that are sold as parts of bulk kids biography sets. Having said that, this stands out as enticing version of that; the pages are bright and colorful, Chloe Perkins’s writing is reasonably snappy and mostly accurate (there’s one or two quibbles to be had, but they’re small.) It is utterly bereft of photographs; instead, it’s all UPA Animation-esque drawings by Scott Burroughs with bits of Peanuts strips set in. I could criticize the art in 100 ways (and had fun doing that about the cover a few weeks back), but while it’s not a great capturing of reality, it’s kind of fun on its own silly level. And unlike the other books I compared it to, this is priced for actual purchase, a mere $3.99 in paperback.

This folks reading this blog probably won’t learn anything actually new by reading this book… but by the time you get toward the end, the book has already declared you an “official History of Fun Stuff Expert on Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the Peanuts gang”… and even after that, it has more to tell you, like how to draw Charlie Brown, and how animation works by using “persistence of vision” and the “phi phenomenon”.

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