Pippi Goes to the Circus

ANNOTATION

Pippi and her friends, Tommy and Annika, attend the circus where Pippi walks the tightrope and wrestles with the "World's Strongest Man."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Who goes to the circus and rides on the back of a horse—and on the back of the ringmaster, too? Who walks the tightrope and does better tricks than any acrobat? And who dares to lift Adolf, the strongest man in the world? Why it's Pippi Longstocking, of course. No one's ever seen a circus like this before, because when Pippi goes to the show, she doesn't just watch, she takes over! The Pippi Longstocking storybooks, excerpted from the original novels with Astrid Lindgren's assistance, are perfect for young readers and listeners just getting ready to enter the amazing, crazy world of Pippi and her friends.

FROM THE CRITICS

Kirkus Reviews

Pippi Longstocking, the nine-year-old who lives by herself in her own house with her own horse and has inspired generations of children with her spunk and power, is shoehorned into an egregious picture-book length version of one of her adventures. The text is excerpted from two chapters of Pippi Longstocking, but it is surprising how flat it is out of context. Pippi's neighbors Tommy and Annika invite Pippi to go to the circus with them, and she gets them all ringside seats with a gold piece from her suitcase. Irrepressible as always, Pippi leaps on the horse with the bareback rider, does wilder tricks than the tightrope walker, and bests the circus strongman at his own game. The ringmaster is horrified, but the crowd loves it, and Tommy and Annika think she is the best show of all. It ends rather abruptly with Pippi's falling asleep in her seat. Chesworth imagines Pippi as a Howdy Doody look-alike, and, by depicting in detail all her stunts, shows how absurd they are outside the realm of the imagination. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and the Little House girls have also shown up in picture books, and so has Pippi (Pippi Longstocking's After-Christmas Party, 1996), but this excerpt will not send readers back to Lindgren's originals. (Picture book. 9-11) .