Pippi Goes To School (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)

Pippi Longstocking's long red braids are the very image of childhood rebellion. In Pippi Goes to School, our heroine's insurrectionary spirit is hardly dampened by her first taste of academe. Her friends Tommy and Annika head off bright and early at 8 a.m., "hand in hand, swinging their schoolbags." Pippi can't be bothered to get going until a little later: "At exactly ten o'clock she lifted her horse off the front porch, and a little later all the people in the town ran to their windows to see what horse it was that was running away." It's just Pippi headed for school in her own inimitable fashion. The teacher's vain attempts to teach her math and art and music fail miserably. When asked to add 7 and 5, she retorts, "If you don't know that yourself, you needn't think I'm going to tell you." It's not that Pippi's naughty, it's just that she has her own way of doing things. At the end of the day, it's she who's consoling the exhausted teacher: "You understand, Teacher, don't you, that when you have a mother who's an angel and father who's a cannibal king, and when you have sailed on the ocean all your whole life, then you don't know just how to behave in school." This slender paperback picture book is neatly adapted from the Astrid Lindgren classic Pippi Longstocking, with assistance from Lindgren herself. Michael Chesworth's lively, modernized illustrations make clever reference to the original edition, without being slavish. (Ages 4 to 8)--Claire Dederer

Astrid Lindgren (1907–2002) was born in Sweden. After college, she worked in a newspaper office and a Swedish publishing house. Her most famous and beloved book, Pippi Longstocking, was originally published in Swedish in 1950 and was later translated into many other languages. It was followed by two sequels, Pippi Goes on Board and Pippi in the South Seas. Ms. Lindgren had a long, prolific career, writing more than 100 picture books, poems, short stories, plays, screenplays, and novels. In 1958, she won the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, the highest international award in children’s literature.