Customer Reviews

The Adventures of Peter Cottontail (Dover Children's Thrift Classics)

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This is a book that has many little mini adventures, broken up into chapters, that all tie in together to create a continuous story that young readers will love. The main character, Peter Rabbit, starts off the tale by trying to come up with another name for himself, one that shouts prestige and presence. Everybody he knows thinks this is silly, and Peter's friends devise a mischievous scheme to show Peter the downsides of changing his name. Peter learns his mistake and quickly changes his name back. The book goes on like this with most of the chapters revolving around mischief or trickery.

The forest dwelling characters in this story are well distinguished and each brings a certain characteristic about them that really makes this book shine. There is a Fox who is on the look out for Peter and a poetic skunk, just to name a few.

I found the adventures, and the overall book to be very funny and interesting. Qualities I'm sure young 9-12 year old readers will appreciate.

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

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 three sets of original Harrison Cady illustrations for this title:
-- Published by Little, Brown, with 6 full-page grayscale illustrations.
-- Published by Little, Brown, with 10 full-page color 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 editions, plus many smaller line drawings. Also a paperback version of this published under the name "Tempo".

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

On the other hand, the cover illustration is one of only four special paintings Cady did of Burgess animals. As far as I know, the four Dover titles that have them are the first editions to use them. The price of the book is worth it for that cover alone.

I recommend the Grosset & Dunlap (and Tempo) editions. 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.

The Little, Brown edition with the 10 full-page color illustrations was done about the same time as the Grosset & Dunlap drawings, but that edition is very rare.

I love this book! After I read it, I read all the other books in this siries I could get my hands on. Though short, great!