I got four new Peanuts books in the mail this week.

1. You Got a Rock, Charlie Brown! is a Ready-to-Read Level Two book that adapts parts of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, focusing on the Charlie Brown portions. The adaptation is written by Maggie Tesla and drawn by Robert Pope, and it is well done for the format. They do give the tale a bit of a hopeful ending that the source material lacks, but then happying up Peanuts for other media seems to be the standard these days. The book comes with two pages of stickers – many of Peanuts characters, and then some stars with pro-reading text on them like “Reading star” and “I love to read!” and “I read this book!” And I got to tell you, that last one bothers me. Exactly where are you supposed to put it? If you put it on the book, then no one knows who “I” is. And if you put it on yourself, what’s the book?
2. The Legend of the Great Pumpkin is a shaped board book here each spread adapts a different Great Pumpkin-themed Peanuts strip with a couple images and a fair amount of text for the board book form. But hey, without the text, how else could kids learn the word “Zamboni”?
3. The Great Pumpkin Returns is a new story, a sequel to the TV special. It’s another year, and this time the person that Linus gets to accompany him to the pumpkin patch is someone with the same initials as “pumpkin patch”. No, not “Pig Pen”, it’s Peppermint Patty. This full-color wide paperback has about 24 pages of story, written by Jason Cooper, who is a staff writer at the Peanuts studio.
4. You Got a Rock, Charlie Brown! is a second copy of the first book, because sometimes I forget that I ordered a book already and accidentally order it again. Some trick-or-treater will be leaving here with a book, come October.

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