Pete & Pickles

I loved this book. I gave it as a baby gift to a die-hard Bloom County fan, and it is Berke Breathed at his finest. The illustrations are beautiful (of course they would be), and the story is touching without being cheesy. It is funny, too, in true Bloom County fashion. I recommend this to anyone (kid, adult, whatever)!

Have always loved Bloom County. So when I was looking for children's books for my nieces I found this and the artwork is fabulous and the story is too cute for words. Great for someone tired of fairy tales and little princesses. The girls loved it very much!

Based on a great review in one of my parenting magazines, I bought several copies of this book to give as Christmas presents to my son and my nieces and nephews. After receiving it and reviewing it, I discovered it was a great book and very moving but much too heavy a read for little kids. The book begins with the main character tending to his wife's grave. The next several pages, including that one, while beautifully illustrated, are very gray, depressing, and haunting. I loved the book, but would never give this to a child. My parenting magazine recommended this for kids ages 3 and up, but I strongly disagree with that. I am now in the process of returning these books to amazon.

What an interesting book! I love it, choose to use it for my classroom teaching. It's a moving love story between two unlikely creatures. The drawings are really cute! It's one of my most prized children/adult books.

Let me start by saying that I am not a Berkeley Breathed devotee... I've nothing against him mind you, and I like the comic well enough, but my comments on this book are limited to reviewing the book itself without regard to Breathed's full body of work and accomplishments.

Overall, I found Pete and Pickles to be a really interesting and thoughtful read, but I would never buy it for my kids, or read it to them. There are several reasons for this, but I'll say right off that the primary one is that the book starts off with the pig going to bed early because of a storm so that he could get on with the same nightmare he has every time it storms -- of drowning. If I read this to my 6-year old girl, she's be in my bed *every time it rained!!!* I couldn't get past that right there.

Now I know that may seem shortsighted to those who appreciate the complexity and intelligence of Breathed's work, but the main thing that I look for in a children's book is that it will good for my children. Even if I read this to her once, and miraculously avoided the attendant nightmares, I'm quite confident she'd never let me open it again, branding it as "too scary."

There is some value for children in the book, though...perhaps an older one than mine. The overall notion of stepping outside your solitary comfort zone and getting involved and allowing someone to affect and enrich your "comfortable" life is incredibly admirable. However, I feel like for young children, this message will be lost in the overall dark and creepy feel of the story. No, I don't think that everything for children needs to be cutesy and adorable, emitting sunshine and flowers. But I think this book is along the lines of animated movies that are way over children's heads.

The best and most moving part of the book in my option is actually the inside back of the dust jacket, where Breathed talks about how his daughter actually did the initial concept drawing for this book on a placemat at a restaurant. She drew an elephant holding a pig in his trunk and putting flowers on the pig's head. When he asked her what she drew, she replied the pig was sad, because he was longely, but "he doesn't know it." It really is a lovely sentiment, and so needed for kids. But overall, I think the delivery is just too complex and mature for most children.