Customer Reviews

The Adventures of Chatterer the Red Squirrel (Dover Children's Thrift Classics)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
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Chatterer the Red Squirrel is a precious animal adventure story that young children will love. While reading it to my 7 year old, my 11 and 13 year olds would inevitably wander into the room. Chatterer is a mischievous little red squirrel. If he's not picking on Shadow the Weasel and learning the hard way what an unruly tongue can do, he's in Farmer Brown's Corn CRib stealing corn. His mischieviousness finally catches up with him and because of his carelessness Farmer Brown's boy traps him. He then becomes a prisoner, although a quite comfortable one. He soon realizes that freedom is much more important than anything else. Throughout the story he learns many life lessons, although they seem small, which we as humans should take to heart. I would highly recommend this book.

I thought the Adventure books were great!(Chatterer the best!)I first started reading them when I was about 7 or 8. I'm now 13 and I still enjoy the books. They really do help kids appreciate nature and most importantly, life. These would be great books for kids ages 5 to 10, I think.

Mischievous and fun loving, Chatterer the Red Squirrel, takes center stage in this fun and entertaining tale about a squirrel who sets out to find a new home and ends up in more trouble than he ever thought possible.

The tale starts out with Chatterer being chased by one of the area's most feared predators: Shadow the Weasel. All seems hopeless for Chatterer until he comes up with a brilliant last minute plan and sets another predator after Shadow; proving that sometimes it pays to be mischievous! Chatterer escapes that scenario only to find himself a prisoner of Farmer Brown's boy. Now Farmer Brown's boy doesn't consider Chatterer to be his prisoner, only his pet of sorts as he put Chatterer in a cage. However, while Chatterer is well fed and looked after, he lacks the freedom that he so desires. That is until one day when Chatterer is lucky enough to escape when Farmer Brown's boy leaves the gate open; whether by accident or on purpose, we never truly find out.

I found the most charming aspect of this tale to be Chatterer's innocent love of mischief. He never takes his love of mischief too far, so we the parents are able to enjoy and appreciate it as a good source of entertainment for children. I highly recommend the book and hope you give it a try.

Darien Summers, author of The Mischievous Hare, a children's book.

I read this when I was a kid, 55 plus years ago, and I still remember enjoying it. It was written in 1915. I bought two copies, one for my 9 year old grandson, and one for me! I have finished mine and grandson and I are reading it together when we visit. It is hard to get kids into a book with all the video games, but his is a great way to do it. Two copies cost a total of $5 plus shipping. Fantastic deal.

This review applies to the edition published by Dover. Unfortunately all reviews show up under all editions, regardless of publisher.

This is a wonderful book and I highly recommend it. However, the prospective buyer should be informed that the illustrations in this Dover edition are NOT by the original illustrator, Harrison Cady. Instead, they are crude redrawings by another artist, Thea Kliros. Although they are better than the illustrations in the Dover titles for which artist Pat Stewart did the crude redrawings, they are not as charming as Cady's work.

Some of the other titles in this Dover series of Thornton Burgess books do have original Harrison Cady illustrations.

To get real Harrison Cady illustrations of this title, you'll have to buy a used book. There were two sets of original Harrison Cady illustrations for this title:
-- Published by Little, Brown, with 6 full-page grayscale illustrations.
-- Published by Grosset & Dunlap, with 14 full-page B&W line drawings, including line-drawing versions of all 6 original grayscale illustrations in the Little, Brown edition, plus many smaller line drawings.

The redrawings in this Dover edition are of the 6 grayscale Little, Brown illustrations.

I recommend the Grosset & Dunlap edition. Cady did them decades after he did the 6 grayscale Little, Brown illustrations, after he had grown as an artist. Even though the Grosset & Dunlap line drawings are simpler than the Little, Brown grayscale illustrations, they are more charming. On the other hand, the Little, Brown grayscale illustrations better show Cady's remarkable vision for Burgess' creatures, so if you can get both, that's ideal. But either one is better than the drawings in this Dover edition.