Our 26-hour car ride back from the Midwest this weekend was made more pleasant by listening to The Boxcar Children on cassette tape (You may have noticed that the posts here have been a little sparse the past week or so; that should improve a bit now that we're back :-)
I was really pleased with this book as a read-aloud choice for my almost-four-year-old. Here's what I liked:
1. She found it really entertaining. We started the tapes a little late in the trip and so didn't make it all the way through. It was cute to find my daughter and husband sprawled out on the living room floor this morning listening to the rest of the story on the tape deck inside the house (they really wanted to find out what happened!)
2. The complexity of the language and story was just complex enough to be a little beyond her. It was not so difficult as to cause frustration, but not so easy that she caught everything the first time. That's exactly the balance I look for in a read-aloud.
3. Orphaned children setting up house in an old railroad car is the kind of story that sparks imaginative play.
4. The children model exemplary behavior in natural, child-like ways. The book is not at all moralistic or preachy, but one can't help being impressed with the importance of responsibility, care for one's brothers and sisters, hard work, and resourcefulness by the way the story unfolds.
I think I might have read some of the 18 books that follow in this series as a child, but I don't remember much about them. Does anyone have experience with books that follow the original Boxcar Children story? Are they good, or do they become mediocre in that way that is so typical for sequels? Any other good read-aloud recommendations for preschoolers?
9 comments:
I loved reading these books to when I was a kid and also reading them to my kids.
The second book was also good--the children live on an island by themselves for the summer. After that they shift from being exercises in self-reliance to mysteries. They are still entertaining, but they lose some of the appeal of the original. They also would be less easy for a preschooler to follow. In addition, many of these later books were not actually written by Gertrude Chandler Warner.
I avoid the ones that say "Created by" Gertrude Chandler Warner. In the books she wrote, the children get a little older each book, till by the end Henry is in college. In the "Created by" books, they all start out by saying that 5-year-old Benny does this, etc, going back to the ages they were in the first book. I also thought they seemed to be written in a much later era than the simpler, more innocent time in which the originals were written.
Thanks, Sarah. That was exactly the kind of thing I was curious to know!
Thank you! This is helpful!
My boys, older than your kids, enjoyed this book last summer. I never read the later ones, but remember loving this first one as a kid; their ingenuity was inspiring. Audio books are great aren't they? I've been surprised at how much my 8 yr old son, who is not a big fan of reading himself, loves the audio books. Now w/the mp3s you can get from the library, he feels super cool listening to them.
Gertrude Chandler Warner wrote the first dozen or so herself, then someone else added the later ones. I made the mistake of getting one of the later ones - they lack the language and...affection? that I appreciate in the first ones. GCW clearly loved children, both her readers and the ones in her stories. I didn't get that vibe in the later ones.
Affection is such a great word for what I felt in this first book!
Love this one. Thanks for the reminder. . .
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